If I had only one book of poetry, it would be this one. It’s my “take to the lonely island” choice of book. Mainly contemporary poems, some straightforward, others weird but not so straightforwards as to be banal and boring or so weird as to be inaccessible. I’ve been reading it for years and still find new and touching stuff when I open it, it’s as if someone assembled my favorite poems before I even knew them. Today’s find:
Poem for a Daughter
“I think I’m going to have it,”
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
“Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.”
A judgment years prove true.
Certainly I’ve never had you
as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their spheres together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.
A woman’s life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.
Anne Stevenson
