A LULLABY FOR BLUE EYES

In "The Mother," Gwendolyn Brooks writes honestly about the pain and anguish of abortion: "Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you all." Lucille Clifton wrote her own "Lost Baby Poem: ...the time I dropped your almost body down to meet the waters under the city and run with the sewage to the sea ... you would have been born into winter in the year of the disconnected gas and no car...." My own "lost baby" poem was written years after the event, but the emotion that inspired it was as fresh as it had been eleven years before I found the words.


Forgive me.
I never knew you,
(male or female?),
never heard your choked cries
there in your laboring bed.

I never dreamed the color
of your eyes,
never felt the wet push
of your head.

I never knew your body
curled in mine,
(female or male?), then
forgive me,
you were dead,
the sudden spreading blood
washed red from the sterile table.

I wonder again and again
what roaring incinerator
tended to ashes the tiny hands
I could not warm?
Did you know pain?

In my heart
I wrap you up against the rain
and ever we rock & lullaby
while Venus rises steady overhead.
I think my love
created you in vain. In my mind
your sleepy eyes
are blue.