The Poetry of Pregnancy

When I deliver a baby, my first thought is not to count fingers and toes or to check for family resemblance. Usually, I am much more selfish than that. My first thought is, Hooray! I'm not pregnant anymore! I have heard moms talk of how they love to be pregnant; how they even feel sexier than usual, or how they feel vivacious and energetic. I wish I could claim that I handle pregnancy with as much aplomb. I can't.

I feel huge, uncomfortable, overheated, and about as attractive as an over ripe pear. Mentally, I am simultaneously out of focus and prone to obsession. I could make a list of strange obsessions I have experienced while pregnant, but it would be far too telling and inexplicable. If you are acquainted with my blog, you can probably guess a few of them.

Sometimes I get so caught up in the woes of pregnancy that I forget the wonder of it. As always, I turn to literature to remind me that life is, in fact, profound and that there is nothing more profound and meaningful than its perpetuation.

I would love to compose a poem about the pregnancy experience, but I have broken the one cardinal rule of poetry composition: to write poetry, one must read poetry. I confess that I simply haven't picked up a book of poems in quite a long time and so, I must rely on what already exists.

My husband has disliked Sylvia Plath since he had to read her poem, "Daddy" in a college English course. I agree that "Daddy" is a little bitter for my tastes as well, but, when I read "Metaphors," Sylvia is my friend once again:

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,

An elephant, a ponderous house,

A melon strolling on two tendrils.

O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.

Money's new minted in this fat purse.

I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

I've eaten a bag of green apples.

Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Ironically, sometimes it is the male poet who is able to see past the physicality of pregnancy and to take it to a more transcendent level. This by contemporary poet Bill Kloefkorn, State Poet of Nebraska is about as gorgeous a thing as has ever been written:

Covenant

Here is the story I might have heard,

More likely dreamed: the woman

after the first trimester

required by village covenant

to compose a lullaby,

to sing it daily then

to the gathering child, only

from memory and in deliberate

isolation,

the man not permitted to listen

until the infant had been delivered

and pronounced both whole and

welcome. And this ritual

I'd go to church to live with,

solace in the belief

that not so very far away

always a woman sits singing her own

creation

to that small creation breathing

as if a delicate fish inside her,

always not so far away

a confluence of word and of music

flowing somehow into the ear

of the unborn,

there to do whatever the inexplicable does

to sustain us,

my mother meanwhile who couldn't

carry a tune in a washtub

singing as she carried the washtub

outside to empty the rinsewater,

that same tub later

filled with the well-wrung

family wash, each item on the line

moving in the breeze

like a quaint crustacean,

each movement singing.

And finally this excerpt from my favorite Dylan Thomas poem.

from Fern Hill

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden.

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On the fields of praise.

Perhaps it is time for me to consider something other than the centimeters and percentages of childbirth and to ponder and enjoy the small universe of my womb; to appreciate that kicking writhing creature whose creation like all great creations starts, "In the beginning. . ."