Birth: A Collection of Poems

Sarah N. Cross & Elizabeth Dickhut & Monica Kidd &

Katie Antony & Gretchen A. Case & Moira Linehan &

Carl Tyler

Published online: 6 March 2012# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Birth is the most common of all human experiences. Of course, birth transcends humanityand is something we share with other mammals although humans have had to overcome thespecific challenges posed by both walking upright and having a larger cranium. Birth is also,by design, unique. And it is our consciousness that makes birth unique—our experience ofand the meaning we ascribe to birth. At least two lives are transformed by birth, the motherand the child. The history of birth as a human endeavor is rich; our experience of it and ourunderstanding of it are influenced by our society, religion, education, etc. The six poems inthis collection offer different perspectives on that uniquely human experience: birth.

“Midwife” by Elizabeth Dickhut takes us to the very intimate relationship between thebaby and mother during labor where the baby is cradled in “a bassinet of bones” while thebirth attendant waits to “pull… a swollen bulb/from dark, wet soil.” She gives an unsenti-mental account of obstructed labor and its modern life-saving solution: the cesarean delivery.

Monica Kidd’s “On Poor Obstetrical Outcomes” reminds us that, even with modernmedicine, birth is a natural process with inherent risk where babies can be “blue on a bed” or“baptized/The night is a thief.” Even in today’s hospitals, birth is not devoid of death orillness, and birth attendants must be able to manage these complications both medically andemotionally.

“Place of Birth” by Katie Antony places humans in the natural order of things, likeningher birth to “the amoeba… being ripped in half.” This poem takes us back in the medicalhistory of birth when women “awoke with a child and no memory of labor and is anunappologetic account of the pain associated with delivery.

Gretchen A. Case’s “The Faithful” is a study of the “never-born,” exploring what wemight learn about life and birth from fetuses. She gives an honest account of how intellectualcuriosity might foster an emotional desire until the glass jars are replaced by “a sloshing,/aweight,/something to hold close.”

Unfortunately birth is, inevitably, coupled with its darker twin. No exploration ofbirth is complete without acknowledging this inevitability. “After a Long Grief” byMoira Linehan acknowledges the human difficulty in accepting death: “like schools of

J Med Humanit (2012) 33:127–134DOI 10.1007/s10912-012-9174-8

S. N. Cross (*) : E. Dickhut :M. Kidd :K. Antony : G. A. Case :M. Linehan : C. Tyler186 Edwards Street #2R, New Haven, CT 06511, USAe-mail: sarahcross@alum.swarthmore.edu

minnows you have to wait for/your eyes to register… let the shimmering scrim comeinto focus.” She reminds us that “whatever moves on leaves forever” and that withoutbirth we are “barren… changed” and that we should “let the wondrous/at last washover [y]our register of loss.”

Finally, Carl Tyler’s “Swept Away” brings us full circle to the end of life wherewe are “swept into that wide ocean” from whence we came. This poem asks whether“those diluvian memories return” during death reminding us of its connection to birth.

Midwife

My midwife stays with me,a voluntary second shiftbecause she wants tocatch my baby. After nine months,she’s earned the rightto gently tug and twistmy son from meas if pulling a swollen bulbfrom dark, wet soil.

But my baby will not crown.Instead, he cradles himselfbetween the ilium and ischium,a bassinet of bones,refusing each push, alreadystubborn as henbitgrowing between two stones.

After hours of pushing,of the midwife gently pressingher fingers against my ripened cervix,she admits, It’s time.The doctor arrives, stands at the endof my bed. Her green eyes shine,two Egyptian scarabs pressingagainst my heart. Suddenly,I am pulled away, pushed throughthe swinging doors that smack open.

Minutes later,the doctor slides the scalpelacross my skin. I sense a sudden splitlike a poppy bursting open.The doctor pulls my son from me.His body, a long, fatuous taproot,hangs from her muscled hands.

My midwife stays with me,pressing her palm against mine.

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Her voice spirals between us, a tendrilof comfort, a woven basket of words,catching only me.

Elizabeth Dickhut

Commentary on “Midwife“

I wrote “Midwife” after my son’s sixth birthday. Though the birth of my son waspowerful and moving, the commitment of my midwife, Kathy, was equally importantto me. When my husband and I arrived at the hospital, she was getting ready to gohome. Once she saw us, she wanted to stay. Her presence throughout my labor,including surgery, was calming, reassuring, and kind. When I began this poem, it wasoriginally going to be about the surgery itself, about feeling pulled apart, about thesensation of something being ripped from me. Very quickly, it shifted to Kathy andher nurturing spirit. Using metaphors and imagery about growth and fertility wasfitting not only because of the subject of birth but also because my midwife knew thebody as a gardener knows the earth. This is the very reason why she and I were bothdisappointed when she would not catch my baby. We both felt as though someoneelse would be trampling in something that was not theirs. In the end, she held myhand through the delivery; she stayed with me. This, I will never forget.

On Poor Obstetrical OutcomesFor Sandra & Shirley

Flat as piss on a plate,he said, as the roomsettled into stillness,the baby blue on a bedin another room.Stitching her closed,we waited for words.

His hands like mitts,eyes staring blanklypast the doctorsinto the rainy night,he is baptized.The night is a thief.

Monica Kidd

Commentary on “On Poor Obstetrical Outcomes”

I wrote “On Poor Obstetrical Outcome” during my obstetrics rotation as part of myfamily medicine residency. It’s a reflection on those thankfully rare times when onegets a complete surprise at the moment of delivery-in this case, a blue, unresponsivebaby born to a mother who’d already suffered a stillbirth but whose antenatal coursethis time had been completely normal and a baby with undiagnosed Down syndrome.

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The first baby came around within half an hour or so and was utterly well afterward(we figured it was a dose of narcotics too close to delivery that was to blame). I stillsee the mom of the second baby from time to time around the hospital when he’s inthe tertiary care centre for more investigations or surgery. I’m not sure she’s everaccepted his diagnosis.

I was heavily pregnant myself when I did those deliveries, and I remember feeling bothconspicuous and nervous: who was to say my own delivery wouldn’t also end with a too-silent room?

Place of Birth

It’s strange the places I find,hiding from pain. The anesthetistsays I’m going to an island, imaginethe beach, a margarita and I tastethe salt as sweat drips across my lips.My husband tells me to think of Maine,contractions crash in with the tide.The nurses say it’s too late for an epiduraland I think of that place, somewherein my back, that makes life pain or pleasure—the sensation of wet and life.

I wonder how the amoeba felthaving their being ripped in half.I was born under ether, my motherawoke with a child and no memory of labor;the room was sterile with metal tablesas I emerged on the wake of fluid.Now I taste sand in my mouth;I am the amoeba; I am my mother,the breeze of the coast gives me goosebumps.

Katie Antony

Commentary on “Place of Birth”

It’s strange, the things doctors tell patients to think about when they are nervousbefore a procedure or before they go under anesthesia. Anesthesiologists sometimestell patients that they’re about to get a margarita in their IV and that they shouldimagine themselves on a beach somewhere. Labor and delivery nurses might tellpatients the same thing when labor pain persists despite an epidural or when patientsdon’t have one. “Place of Birth” attempts to portray these journeys patients take andwhere they find themselves. This poem particularly focuses on the experience ofchildbirth and the continuity of life, despite people’s best attempts to escape thereality that this continuity is painful, both physically and emotionally.

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The Faithful

For one whole month,I had the keys to the Anatomy Lab.I was supposed to help solve the problem of the babies.Fetuses, I mean. And embryos. Specimens.They didn’t float, exactly,but teetered, wavering (waving?)back and forth when the shelves were bumpedor the jars moved.

Historic, invaluable,most never-born.Incompatible with life but too preciousto be tucked away dead in coffinswhere they could not teach.The problem of the babies was:What did they teach?How?

Facing this quandary,I decided to re-organize.I carried them, heavy,close up against my body,holding the lid on tight,fluid sloshing with each step,tiny weight shifting inside.

I got used to the smellof the preservatives clinging to my skin.I got used to the sightof the adult cadavers that shared the room.I got used to the soundof the students working with their tools.I got used to the feelof the babies (fetuses. embryos.) against my belly.

For one whole month,I failed those babies.

For one whole month, every month,for months and years before and after that whole month,I failed all babies.Then one month, this month,the ultrasound screen opens upmy body, my glass jar.

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I look for life-compatibility (not yet),I sniff for formaldehyde (not there),I listen for the student murmurs (only congratulations),I feel a sloshing,a weight,something to hold close.

Gretchen A. Case

Commentary on “The Faithful”

I worked with these jars during a time when my intensely private desire for a child waspainfully unrealized. The scholarly interest in personhood and patient autonomy that hadbrought me to the anatomy lab project was quickly overwhelmed by my emotional response.I was naïve to think that my intellectual training could protect me from feeling that when Iwas moving the jars, I was holding in my arms the babies that I failed to hold in my arms.

I wrote this poem shortly after I learned that I was pregnant, years after my workin the anatomy lab, decades after the embryos and fetuses discussed in my poem werecreated. Likely their now-anonymous mothers were not asked if the products of theirpregnancies should be retained or destroyed. If nothing else, these jars hold artifactsfrom a particular history of pregnancy and childbirth.

Now that my long-awaited daughter has arrived, I feel no closer to understandingwhat those en-jarred creatures can teach us, nor even what they are. I only know thattheir interrupted births echoed unceasingly through my own terribly complicated, butcompleted, experience of pregnancy and delivery. I clutch my baby girl and think—sentimentally, irrationally, without a shred of evidence—that I have some connectionto those mothers, lost to time, still waiting to hold their children.

After A Long GriefLook around once more, only this timelet the other layers come into relief

like schools of minnows you have to wait foryour eyes to register. Until you wonder,

How could I have missed all that darting?Then look again, only this time around

let the shimmering scrim come into focus—this time maybe a million water bugs

dancing their endless dance of abandon.As for the water fowl that nest near your pond:

let their migrations serve as remindersthat whatever moves on leaves forever

part of itself behind, if only nothing morethan that matted place where it lay in loosestrife.

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Now that barren, that changed, let the wondrousat last wash over your register of loss.

Moira Linehan

Commentary on “After A Long Grief”

In a sentence, this is a poem about realizing I have come back into the world“after a long grief.” I use the setting of the pond in my back yard to show that griefwas a kind of blindness. Now that my grief is behind me (the blindness healed), I canonce more see the beauty there and how it is teeming with life.

In making this poem, though, I was also interested in having it embody theexperience of grief. I use a key aspect of my art—the line break—to make presentthe liminal realm where the beloved is both gone and still here. Take the line thatwhatever moves on leaves forever at face value and don’t read any further. You havethe finality of death, that the dead are truly gone. However, the line continues: part ofitself behind. Through the use of that line break the speaker/the reader is in the fog ofgrief: the beloved is gone, yet remains. Even there, though, the line goes on and pullsthe speaker/the reader back to reality: if only nothing more. Absence has become apresence. Yet the setting of this poem is rooted in time: after a long grief. Impossibleas it seemed in the early years of grief, time does heal. At least it heals the blindnesscomponent of grief. This poem, I hope, witnesses to that fact.

Swept AwayPotent, those childhood memories remainedOf Mississippi floodwatersDevastating her native NatchezSweeping people and livestockTo watery oblivion.

In her 94th yearHer aortic valve strangled the flow of bloodBeyond the point of redemption.She battled the bipap machineThat grotesquely splayed her lips apart,Tore at her pulse oximetry,Gnawed the mittens binding her hands.

Recognizing the futility of it all,I removed those instruments of torture.She motioned me to come closerTo hear her last coherent words:“I love you,”“I love everyone.”

In your final hours,As you rested motionlessScapular draping your neckRosary cupped in your hands,

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Did those diluvian memories returnAs you were swept into that wide ocean?

Carl Tyler

Commentary on “Swept Away”

As a physician who practices and teaches geriatric medicine, I am privileged to attendpersons at the end of life. In many respects, I see my work very much analogous to that ofmy colleagues who provide obstetrical care, assisting individuals in their journeys from onestate of being to another. For me, the end of life is the dawn to a new existence-a secondbirth.

Among the most intimate of all conversations are those that occur at the bedside ofthe dying. The content and course of such conversations is often richly unpredictable.

The setting of this poem is one such conversation, at the death bed of one of my patients.While her mother lies motionless in a coma, her daughter and I hold vigil. Without evidentconnection to our earlier conversation, her daughter begins to talk about her mother’schildhood in Natchez, and her eye-witnessing of a devastating Mississippi flood. Well intoher 90’s, her mother would recall in vivid detail the flood and its horrific destruction.

In the context of her dying, my mind fixed on the image of floodwaters. I recalledbiblical images of The Flood, whereby complete obliteration led to the re-birth of anew earth and a new mankind. I thought of the Nile floodwaters, with its cycles ofdestruction and new life. I pondered the pleuri-potential nature of water: the fluid thatsurrounds and protects unborn life, the fluid that sustains life, and a means of death.As she lay dying, I imagined her peacefully and effortlessly dissolving into a greatocean, awaiting a rebirth.

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