I've been outside the blog for a year, am climbing back on as we head toward April's National Poetry Month. I rarely publish poems here on the blog, but this one was just published in a print journal that wrecked the title, so here it is as I want it. The idea of who gets to have children and who doesn't, who chooses and who doesn't is coming up in my poetry as it has in my life for decades, and I am indebted to Ada Limón for leading the way.
DES
What if instead of carrying
A child, I am supposed to carry
grief.
--Ada Limón
You can carry
grief or carry on, like luggage.
My friend Deb
did, after the O.S.U. clinic doctor
left her up in
stirrups, inserted with a cold speculum,
returned with his
colleague, said, “I have never
seen one—you?”
“Nope.” Hopeless, they said.
She went on to
have one son. I have none,
and today, at age
70, I finally look up photos
of my cervix, or,
the kind the doctors saw
in me, one
gasping till I explained DES,
which 1950s women
took rather than carry grief.
I’ve carried some
abandoned 18-year-olds, some
incarcerated
kids. No photos of the babies
I did not have
wearing Christmas dresses.
I go to their
weddings, their funerals, Zoom
with them: my 50-year-old
trans kid, clobbered
by Behçets, my
CIA agent, one academic,
three horse
breeders, all kidless, carrying
other stuff: U.S.
secrets, HBCU grant applications,
sperm loaded into
green sacks, nieces,
a wife with
cancer. “To move by supporting,”
as the dictionary
says, with your hands or arms,
on your back,
from one place to another,
one term or phase
or lifetime, not mother.
Wow, Diane.
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