Poetry Thursday: Sharon Olds # 2

"Write hard and clear about what hurts"
~ Ernest Hemingway

This is the only poem I can offer today as it is the one that provoked such an unexpected reaction. I was casting around for something suitable, something that put into words how I was feeling, and then I read Sharon Olds’ New Mother. It might seem like a peculiar choice as I am not a mother and am not likely to become one in the foreseeable future, but reading the words tears came. For me this poem is about what I lost, what I might not have had, and what I might have yet. It is about a man I want to kiss so desperately it has been torturing me this week.

New Mother

A week after our child was born,
you cornered me in the spare room
and we sank down on the bed.
You kissed me and kissed me, my milk undid its
burning slipknot through my nipples,
soaking my shirt. All week I had smelled of milk,
fresh milk, sour. I began to throb:
my sex had been torn easily as cloth by the
crown of her head, I’d been cut with a knife and
sewn, the stitches pulling at my skin – and the
first time you’re broken, you don’t know
you’ll be healed again, better than before.
I lay in fear and blood and milk
while you kissed and kissed me, your lips hot and swollen
as a teenage boy’s, your sex dry and big,
all of you so tender, you hung over me,
over the nest of the stitches, over the
splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who
finds a wounded animal in the woods
and stays with it, not leaving its side
until it is whole, until it can run again.

~ Sharon Olds, Selected Poems

For more poetic inspiration, go here
* the photograph is the first portrait I took of my goddaughter…