Miscarriage

When I was a month pregnant, the great
clots of blood appeared in the pale
green swaying water of the toilet,
Dark red like black in the salty
translucent brine, like forms of life
appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut
shapes of things.

That was the only appearance made by that
child, the dark, scalloped shapes
falling slowly. A month later
our son was conceived, and I never went back
to mourn the one who came as far as the
sill with its information: that we could
botch something, you and I. All wrapped in
purple it floated away, like a messenger
put to death for bearing bad news.

--Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and professor at NYU, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot prize, from The Dead and the Living (1984). 

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.

To Our Miscarried One, Age Fifty Now

Every twenty years, I turn 

and address you, not knowing who you were 

or what you were. You had been three months
in utero, when our friend came to visit
with her virus which I caught and you died—or it may be
your inviableness had been conceived with you—
you might have been, all along, going to
last fourteen weeks, though I had felt,
as we lay on the living-room floor, the couch
pushed in front of the door at the pure gold
hour at the core of your big sister’s
nap, that you had taken deep.
I kept my feet up on the couch an hour—there was a
recipe, for a boy, then:
abstain until the egg emerges, then
send the long-tailed whippersnapper, the
boy-making sperm, in, to get there
before the girls, who are slow but if they
get there early can wait. The boy
we conceived a month after you died
made, years later,
an ink X
on a cushion of that sofa, as if to declare
war on sisters and mothers, the oppressors
of the male. Hello, male, or female,
or both, or neither. Hi mystery,
hi matter, hi spirit moving through matter.
Twenty years ago, when your father
left me, I wanted to hold hands with you,
my friend in death, the dead one
I knew best—and not at all—
who had deserted this life or been driven from it,
I your garden, oasis, desert.
And I’d never laid down a stone for you,
you seemed like a byway on the path from your sister
to your brother. What was half-formed
in you, what was partial—how close I could have
felt to you if I had known what a hidden
story I still was to myself. Dear one,
I feel as if now you are my elder, having died—
though without having breathed—so much earlier than I.
By the time I saw you, you were in the water
already, the sacred toilet-water green
of your grave. Let me call you kin, lost one,
let me call you landsman.

-- Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and professor at NYU, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, from The Sewanee Review, Fall 2018.

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.

Stillborn Elegy

We can't remember her name, but we remember where
we buried her. In a blanket the color of a sky that refuses birds.

The illiterate owls interrogate us from the trees, and we answer,
We don't know. Maybe we named her Dolores, for our grandmother,

meaning sadness, meaning the mild kisses of a priest.
Maybe we called her Ruth, after the missionary who gave us

a rifle and counterfeit wine. We blindfolded our sister and tied
her hands because she groped the fence looking for the rabid fox

we nailed to a post. Katydids sang with insistent summer urge
and the cavalier moon grew more slender. In the coyote hour,

we offered benedictions for a child we may have named Aja,
meaning unborn, meaning the stillness that entered us,

which is the stillness inside the burnt piano, which is also
the woman we untie, who is the mother of stillness.

--Traci Brimhall (1982- ), American poet, professor, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2023-2026. From Our Lady of the Ruins, 2014.

Image: Marika Reinke, Untitle Chaos, painted after her miscarriage in 2008, found here.

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.