Drafting "Maternity Ward"

Between the last time I blogged here and now, I have finished writing a poem. Tentatively titled "Maternity Ward" for now, I took the scenario of a mother giving birth to her twin daughters in the middle of a doctor's strike from a poem I wrote earlier this year. When I workshopped the poem, one of the suggestions I got was that the poem was too long, and it was describing too much. For example, it began with the birth of these two girls, then described them as babies and then went to their girlhood. In other words, I was putting too much pressure on one poem.

So, for this one, I separated the birth story, changed voices and wrote a poem in the mother's voice. I also used a word-list before I began to write this poem. The words were "ant", "chair", "oranges", "stair", "stinking", "slur", "gape", "coldness" and "bones." The word list did help me to extend my reach, I went to places where I haven't treaded fully before. The poem attempts to describe the fears of a new mother. And, she is not afraid of whether she is going to be a "good mother" or not. In this poem of mine, she is afraid of her own survival. Will she live to tell the tale? And, thus by directing my attention to the issue of the mother's self-preservation, I tried to move a little bit beyond the territory of more conventional mothering poems.

At this point, the poem is long-- more than three pages. It is frank, but also drawling. I have been writing shorter poems recently, with crisper, shorter lines. This does not follow that aesthetics. It is more in line with my older work, although, I think, in some very crucial ways, it is different too. I will go back to it at some point. But, for now, I am not unhappy. It gives me a certain kind of satisfaction to be able to say I finished this poem during a full teaching week.