A Child on Childbirth

This is a non-traditional ghazal about how I sometimes feel as a child, combined with a maternal instinct and pressures to one day be a mother.

Shakespeare's kingdom mapped in torrid semen. To be

my womb, the dregs of arid wine.

An unborn generation of flesh 

masked. As the grazed faces on a foreign coin. 

My ovaries in uniform and disease

stroke her and she'll smile.

Moths carved tunnels from the inside-out.

Mon f�"tus; sewn up with silk-worm tongues.

A childless feminist is a true feminist. Her womb a martyr.

A cherry tree is not a true tree.

She collects pictures of our mothers

with swollen bellies. I am ignorant in a passenger jet.

"Here lies beloved Geoffrey Blake, age 72 upon departure.

And here, his son, Lysander, who reached death before life."

Her rosebush dead-headed -secateurs dipped in Loestrin* 20- in favour of sensibility.

And a precognition of footsteps on the staircase. They never came.

Author's Note

Just want to point out that I am not going to become a mother any time soon -or even possibly, at all- just because I sometimes feel maternal and empty. This poem is the side about wanting a child but still being a child, not the strong views I have on, personally, not wanting a child.