To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now

Though I never saw you, only your clouds,

I was afraid of you, of how you differed
from what we had wanted you to be. And it's as if
you waited, then, where such waiting is done,
for when I would look beside me--and here
you are, in the world of forms, where my wifehood
is now, and every action with him,
as if a thousand years from now
you and I are in some antechamber
where the difference between us is of little matter,
you with perhaps not much of a head yet,
dear garden one, you among the shovels
and spades and wafts of beekeeper's shroud
and sky-blue kidskin gloves.
That he left me is not much, compared
to your leaving the earth--you shifting places
on it, and shifting shapes--you threw off your
working clothes of arms and legs,
and moved house, from uterus
to toilet bowl and jointed stem
and sewer out to float the rivers and
bays in painless pieces. And yet
the idea of you has come back to where
I could see you today as a small, impromptu
god of the partial. When I leave for good,
would you hold me in your blue mitt
for the departure hence. I never thought
to see you again, I never thought to seek you.

-- Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and professor at NYU, winner of the Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot prize for this volume, Stag's Leap, 2012.

the lost baby poem

the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned

you would have been born into winter
in the year of the disconnected gas
and no car      we would have made the thin
walk over genesee hill into the canada wind
to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands
you would have fallen naked as snow into winter
if you were here i could tell you these
and some other things

if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers pour over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller
of seas      let black men call me stranger
always      for your never named sake

--Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), African American poet, children's book author, professor of humanities, three time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Poet Laureate of Maryland 1974-1985, from good woman: poems and a memoir, 1969-1980.

Image: Marika Reinke, Goodbye Adrian: A Story of Miscarriage, 2013.

Leaving the Old Gods

I.
The people who watch me hang my coat
on a peg at the office don't even know
about that other life,
the life when there was you, it,
however briefly. To them my body
is a fact casual as the weather.
I could tell them:
That day it rained
the way it rains in the New World.
Leaves struck the window like daggers.
I didn't think about God
but the ones we used to worship
the ones who want your heart still
beating, who load you with gold
and lure you to sleep
deep in the cenote.

II.
A girl, he said, and I nodded
though we couldn't have known.
I would have left him then
for ten thousand pesos.
I don't know what world you inhabit,
swimming there, baby, not-baby,
part of my body, not me,
swept aside like locks of hair
or toenail parings.
It's ten years today
and you who were never alive
pull a face in the leaves
of jacaranda, the only tree
that lives outside my window.
It must be your voice
whistling through the office window,
though I can't understand your words.
Comfort or accusation,
I can't understand your words.

-- Janet McAdams (1957-  ), Scottish, Irish, and Muskogee (Creek) poet, novelist, professor of poetry at Kenyon College, and editor-at-large of the Kenyon Review. From The Island of Lost Luggage, 2001, which received an American Book Award.

Image: Sarah K Reece, "Waiting for You," ink drawing, 2014, found here.

Lullaby

The upland falls behind the house, 

live and scrub oak, barbed wire 

firmly implanted stringing unlikely 

trees together, terrace by terrace, 

down and down, white rock
gleaming through the green. 

The art of memory, they say, 

is to forget. So sleep now, 

smile and sleep and let me 

think, sleep past the molecules 

of grief, let me kneel and believe,

believe and submit. 

Soon enough you'll know hunger, 

then sweetness, then a sweet 

hunger for what reaches 

out to touch. Soon, too, 

those poor, nerveless times,

those times when you curse 

and strike out at yourself, 

when you count up wrongs 

and feed them as if they were 

one prairie fire. As I sit 

and watch you sleep,
I grow angry, too, 

at my abstraction of your sorrow, 

at its necessity, at the very idea 

of what I cannot speak,
it's so unspeakable.

So sleep and smile,
sleep deep.

--Ralph Burns (1949- ), Oklahoma-born American poet and former professor at the University of Arkansas- Little Rock, from Poetry magazine, November 1988.

Miscarriage

                   1

Down of no comfort, 

pillows for loss, 

white feathers floated
over the hospital road.

One caught the windshield 

and held a moment, 

small flag of hope, then vanished

in the clearer logic of air. 

On the long last grade 

we overtook the flatbed
stacked with shivering geese. 

                   2

In the garden

the com silk browned.

The ears spiraled
plump from the stalks. 

Beneath the husks 

a green worm worked 

its way down,
gorging itself. 

In its wake the offal
of its life hung. 

                   3

I drew stems of daisies 

and zinnias from buckets
in the florist's shop,
pinched one in my numbed hand.

The woman smiled, said 

they'd cheer a room and not 

to worry, the hurt
stem would mend. 

                   4

The evening storm, first 

only sensed, hit so hard 

it was all there was
to see, to hear.

Gradually it slowed, disappeared.
Silhouettes of trees emerged.

Streetlamps glittered
on the housetops. 

We ate what we salvaged
of the corn, and it was sweet. 

Deep in the night the air 

flinched like a fitful sleeper, 

and the rain stored in the trees
fell again.

--Eric Nelson (1952- ), American poet and professor emeritus at Georgia Southern University, from Poetry magazine, October 1988.

Children's Hospital

Our sorrow had neither place nor carrier-away,
and dared not hover over the child
whose breath opened as transom
of a frail house.
Nor could we put our sorrow in the dictionary,
for ghastliness already shot out its own defining
in rags of fired light.
Pigeons would not sleek it
over their dirty coats, nor fly
sorrow against the aviary's sharp fence.
Each day bridgeless, each night birdless,
all the nocturnals needless at the expanse
of our nightwatch.
                                But wake at the moon,
we could, mumbling, are we
in a horror show?—inside of sleep
our shock-white minds caught on reels
where a child's body breaks the heart
and the mother can't know
if she counts as a mother. I don't know
if the child heard
what wept at the bedside,
orderlies snapping smelling salts from chalky bullets
against all the mothers falling,
all the fathers under
what each branch let down:
there's a hidden weight to snow.

--Katie Ford (1975- ), American poet, essayist, and professor. 

Mama's Promise

I have no answer to the blank inequity
of a four-year-old dying of cancer.
I saw her on t.v. and wept
with my mouth full of meatloaf.

I constantly flash on disasters now;
red lights shout Warning. Danger.
everywhere I look.
I buckle him in, but what if a car
with a grille like a sharkbite
roared up out of the road?
I feed him square meals
but what if the fist of his heart
should simply fall open?
I carried him safely
as long as I could,
but now he's a runaway
on the dangerous highway.
Warning. Danger.
I've started to pray.

But the dangerous highway
curves through blue evenings
when I hold his yielding hand
and snip his miniscule nails
with my vicious-looking scissors.
I carry him around
like an egg in a spoon,
and I remember a porcelain fawn,
a best friend's trust,
my broken faith in myself.
It's not my grace that keeps me erect
as the sidewalk clatters downhill
under my rollerskate wheels.

Sometimes I lie awake
troubled by this thought:
It's not so simple to give a child birth;
you also have to give it death,
the jealous fairy's christening gift.

I've always pictured my own death
as a closed door,
a black room,
a breathless leap from the mountain top
with time to throw out my arms, lift my head,
and see, in the instant my heart stops,
a whole galaxy of blue.
I imagined I'd forget,
in the cessation of feeling,
while the guilt of my lifetime floated away
like a nylon nightgown,
and that I'd fall into clean, fresh forgiveness.

Ah, but the death I've given away
is more mine than the one I've kept:
from my hand the poisoned apple,
from my bow the mistletoe dart.

Then I think of Mama,
her bountiful breasts.
When I was a child, I really swear,
Mama's kisses could heal.
I remember her promise,
and whisper it over my sweet son's sleep:

     When you float to the bottom, child,
     like a mote down a sunbeam,
     you'll see me from a trillion miles away:
     my eyes looking up to you,
     my arms outstretched for you like night.

-- Marilyn Nelson (1947- ), African American poet, translator, children's and young adult author, professor, and Poet Laureate of Connecticut 2001-2006.

Image: detail from Detroit Industry mural, Diego Rivera, 1932-33, painted as Rivera and Frida Kahlo suffered a series of miscarriages

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw, ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)- poet, English supporter of the Oxford movement, convert to Catholicism, Jesuit priest

At Thomas Merton's Grave

We can never be with loss too long.

Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
pausing upon the stone crucifix,
singing: “I am marvelous alone!”
Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:
rows of marrow and bone undone.
The horizon’s flashing fastens tight,
sealing the blue hills with vermilion.
Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green.
The cemetery expands its borders—
little milky crosses grow like teeth.
How kind time is, altering space
so nothing stays wrong; and light,
more new light, always arrives.

-- Spencer Reece (1963- ), Episcopal priest and poet

Image: The Dalai Lama at Merton's grave, 1997

Sea Canes

Half my friends are dead.

I will make you new ones, said earth.
No, give me them back, as they were, instead,
with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talk
from the faint surf's drone
through the canes, but I cannot walk

on the moonlit leaves of ocean
down that white road alone,
or float with the dreaming motion

of owls leaving earth's load.
O earth, the number of friends you keep
exceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver;
they were the seraph lances of my faith,
but out of what is lost grows something stronger

that has the rational radiance of stone,
enduring moonlight, further than despair,
strong as the wind, that through dividing canes

brings those we love before us, as they were,
with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

~ Derek Walcott, born in 1930, Caribbean poet, playwright, and watercolorist, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature

Sabbath Poem I (1985)

Not again in this flesh will I see
the old trees stand here as they did,
weighty creatures made of light, delight
of their making straight in them and well,
whatever blight our blindness was or made,
however thought or act might fail.

The burden of absence grows, and I pay
daily the grief I owe to love
for women and men, days and trees
I will not know again. Pray
for the world's light thus borne away.
Pray for the little songs that wake and move.

For comfort as these lights depart,
recall again the angels of the thicket,
columbine aerial in the whelming tangle,
song drifting down, light rain, day
returning in song, the lordly Art
piercing out its humble way.

Though blindness may yet detonate in light,
running all, after all the years, great right
subsumed at last in paltry wrong,
what do we know? Still
the Presence that we come into with song
is here, shaping the seasons of His wild will.


-- Wendell Berry, American poet, farmer, agrarian, and essayist, from A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

Sonnet LXXIII

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

--William Shakespeare (1564-1616), pivotal English playwright, poet, and actor

Read by Sir Patrick Stewart in his "A Sonnet A Day" COVID19 project:

Easter Morning

 I have a life that did not become, 
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished: 
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or 
as on my lap a child 
not to grow old but dwell on 

it is to his grave I most 
frequently return and return 
to ask what is wrong, what was 
wrong, to see it all by 
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, it’s convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say, 
look how he’s shooting up, and the 
trinket aunts who always had a little 
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark 
or a penny or nickel, and uncles who 
were the rumored fathers of cousins 
who whispered of them as of great, if 
troubled, presences, and school

teachers, just about everybody older 
(and some younger) collected in one place
waiting, particularly, but not for 
me, mother and father there, too, and others 
close, close as burrowing 
under skin, all in the graveyard 
assembled, done for, the world they 
used to wield, have trouble and joy 
in, gone 

the child in me that could not become 
was not ready for others to go, 
to go on into change, blessings and 
horrors, but stands there by the road 
where the mishap occurred, crying out for 
help, come and fix this or we 
can’t get by, but the great ones who 
were to return, they could not or did 
not hear and went on in a flurry and 
now, I say in the graveyard, here 
lies the flurry, now it can’t come 
back with help or helpful asides, now 
we all buy the bitter 
incompletions, pick up the knots of 
horror, silently raving, and go on 
crashing into empty ends not 
completions, not rondures the fullness 
has come into and spent itself from 

I stand on the stump 
of a child, whether myself 
or my little brother who died, and 
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for 
for me it is the dearest and the worst, 
it is life nearest to life which is 
life lost: it is my place where 
I must stand and fail, 
calling attention with tears 
to the branches not lofting 
boughs into space, to the barren 
air that holds the world that was my world

though the incompletions
(& completions) burn out 
standing in the flash high-burn 
momentary structure of ash, still it 
is a picture-book, letter-perfect 
Easter morning: I have been for a 
walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook 
works without flashing in an abundant 
tranquility: the birds are lively with 
voice: I saw something I had 
never seen before: two great birds, 
maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked 
and –headed, came from the south oaring 
the great wings steadily; they went 
directly over me, high up, and kept on 
due north: but then one bird, 
the one behind, veered a little to the 
left and the other bird kept on seeming 
not to notice for a minute: the first 
began to circle as if looking for 
something, coasting, resting its wings 
on the down side of some of the circles: 
the other bird came back and they both 
circled, looking perhaps for a draft; 
they turned a few more times, possibly 
rising—at least, clearly resting— 
then flew on falling into distance till 
they broke across the local bush and 
trees: it was a sight of bountiful 
majesty and integrity: the having 
patterns and routes, breaking 
from them to explore other patterns or 
better ways to routes, and then the 
return: a dance sacred as the sap in 
the trees, permanent in its descriptions 
as the ripples round the brook’s 
ripplestone: fresh as this particular 
flood of burn breaking across us now 
from the sun.

--A R Ammons (1926-2001), American poet, National Book Award winner in 1973 and 1993

Heavy Summer Rain

The grasses in the field have toppled,
and in places it seems that a large, now
absent, animal must have passed the night.
The hay will right itself if the day

turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.
None of your blustering entrances
or exits, doors swinging wildly
on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
sighs when you read something sad,
like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
where he traveled after Clover died.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.

--Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) American poet, from Collected Poems (2205)

"Find Work"

I tie my Hat-- I crease my Shawl—
Life's little duties do—precisely
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—
—Emily Dickinson, #443

My mother’s mother, widowed very young
of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit,
moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue
and country heart anaesthetized and mute
with labor. So her kind was taught to do—
“Find work,” she would reply to every grief—
and her one dictum, whether false or true,
tolled heavy with her passionate belief.
Widowed again, with children, in her prime,
she spoke so little it was hard to bear
so much composure, such a truce with time
spent in the lifelong practice of despair.
But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone,
her dishes, and how painfully they shone.

-- Rhina P. Espaillat (1932- ), award-winning Domincan- American poet

Wrapping Stones

Everything I am is what survived
love's leaving. Everything I see, eat, want,
have is what survived the goneness
of what love is. Love, like time, takes down
the house, leaving only the partial walls, 
open squares of light for windows,
and a door. the people here wrap
their special stones in large tea leaves.
I walked back from that looking for
a fallen bamboo the right length
for drying kimonos, thinking what
a surprise it is that even such a love
becomes familiar like everything else.
I kept a place for it, stubborn, blessed.
Even through the six years of pain after.
Now it's like the sun going down
each day. Or the moon changing size
predictably all along its range of feeling.
Dies and comes again. but love is
like the salmon that have not come back
to Walnut Creek for the last three years.

-- Linda Gregg (1942-2019) American poet, who passed away today.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), from The Complete Poems 1926-1979.

From the Film Reaching for the Moon:

What I Said At Her Service

When we pray to love God perfectly,
surely we do not mean only.

(Lord, see how well I have done.)

-- Mary Oliver (1935-2019), American poet, teacher, and writer, from Thirst: Poems, 2006

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

--Mary Oliver (1935-2019) who passed away yesterday, from American Primitive, 1983. Mary Chapin Carpenter quoted from this as the first Mary Oliver poem she ever read.

Cited by Parker J. Palmer in his On Being Blog.

Image: The Canopy at Muir Woods, 2012.

After Her Death

I am trying to find the lesson
for tomorrow. Matthew something.
Which lectionary? I have not
forgotten the Way, but, a little,
the way to the Way.  The trees keep whispering
peace, peace, and the birds
in the shallows are full of the
bodies of small fish and are
content. They open their wings
so easily, and fly. So. It is still
possible.


     I open the book
which the strange, difficult, beautiful church
has given me. To Matthew. Anywhere.

-- Mary Oliver (1935-2019), American poet, teacher, and author, from Thirst: Poems, 2016.