D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow

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@birthpoetry
D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow
The Language of the Brag
by Donna
I’d like to share a poem, specifically, a poem about childbirth that brings a big smile to my face. Actually, it gives me permission to revel in the power of women!
The Language of the Brag
I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the centre of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.
I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.
I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around
my belly big with cowardice and safely,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the centre of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
–Sharon Olds
Painting by: Amanda Greavette
The mother's body knows how to grow a baby and how to birth; she can trust the "knowing," for it belongs to her.
Robbie E. Davis-Floyd
At this time there are few poems about pregnancy and childbirth do I find this curious I want to shriek at any identity this culture gives me claw it to pieces; has nothing to do with me or my baby and never will, has never perceived a human being. My baby is quiet and wise, but I'm a trade name and I'm chaos rainwater on a piano -- I'm so scared then but now of then I'd say I want to make your tunes go away to have a child is more casual than, you might say, and more serious than the definition for who, frankly, was ever born or gave birth? After the usual pain and the well-meaning, mostly but not all, intervention of others and others' words and meanings I find him. Lying next to me yes and being nursed by me. I serve him why not he isn't wrong. I'm infused with a noxious dispirit as the world makes me be a woman everything has gone wrong in some sense by now. Of two poems one sentimental and one not I choose both of his birth and my painful unbirth I choose both. The woman in the photo has a haircut from Vidal Sassoon wears a black silky synthetic top and probably a long skirt the baby on her lap in sleepers and a blue and white Peruvian cap. They look abstracted in the same way. He is the baby unchaotic he is born and I am undone -- feel as if I will never be, was never born. Two years later I obliterate myself again having another child not to be a form of woman but in allegiance to the process I can't quite see. I have begun to be. I sit with my sons in a barely cared-for apartment inside from Chicago in the TV's ambience (black and white, like the snow) purple crocuses there Ted's becoming sick with a lasting illness though we are calm while money doesn't press us a moment of happiness, these bodies are clear all four finally clear and still clear but first, for two years, there's no me here.
Alice Notley, “A Baby Is Born Out of a White Owl's Forehead” (1972)
Germ of new life, whose powers expanding slow For many a moon their full perfection wait,— Haste, precious pledge of happy love, to go Auspicious borne through life's mysterious gate. What powers lie folded in thy curious frame,— Senses from objects locked, and mind from thought! How little canst thou guess thy lofty claim To grasp at all the worlds the Almighty wrought! And see, the genial season's warmth to share, Fresh younglings shoot, and opening roses glow! Swarms of new life exulting fill the air,— Haste, infant bud of being, haste to blow! For thee the nurse prepares her lulling songs, The eager matrons count the lingering day; But far the most thy anxious parent longs On thy soft cheek a mother's kiss to lay. She only asks to lay her burden down, That her glad arms that burden may resume; And nature's sharpest pangs her wishes crown, That free thee living from thy living tomb. She longs to fold to her maternal breast Part of herself, yet to herself unknown; To see and to salute the stranger guest, Fed with her life through many a tedious moon. Come, reap thy rich inheritance of love! Bask in the fondness of a Mother's eye! Nor wit nor eloquence her heart shall move Like the first accents of thy feeble cry. Haste, little captive, burst thy prison doors! Launch on the living world, and spring to light! Nature for thee displays her various stores, Opens her thousand inlets of delight. If charmed verse or muttered prayers had power, With favouring spells to speed thee on thy way, Anxious I'd bid my beads each passing hour, Till thy wished smile thy mother's pangs o'erpay.
“To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected Soon to Become Visible” by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1799)
I have mourned lost days When I accomplished nothing of importance. But not lately. Lately under the lunar tide Of a woman’s ocean, I work My own sea-change: Turning grains of sand to human eyes. I daydream after breakfast While the spirit of egg and toast Knits together a length of bone As fine as a wheatstalk. Later, as I postpone weeding the garden I will make two hands That may tend a hundred gardens. I need ten full moons exactly For keeping the animal promise. I offer myself up: unsaintly, but Transmuted anyway By the most ordinary miracle. I am nothing in this world beyond the things one woman does. But here are eyes that once were pearls. And here is a second chance where there was none.
"Ordinary Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver
The giant wave rises to a peak breath-stopping and the world splits open. Waters flow and on their salt flood a child presses deep, stinging sweet and urgent for birth.
Sheila Kitzinger, A Celebration of Birth
Breathe help me as the next generation carves a pathway from my body. Breathe in this space between worlds I link my life and yours. Breathe each physical exertion pushes you toward my arms. Breathe in vigour and action.
Roma Potiki
How beautiful is this quote? Tag someone you know who is getting close to their due date! This makes for a great imagery meditation during labour.
Child/Bearing
Weeks before your arrival
I am frightened
of your impending and violent entrance
in my world
your presence has already been marked
by blood episodes/hospitals/needles
pains from a placenta/ill-placed
a sub-chorionic/hematoma
my vain form has suffered such distortion
veins enlarged/lungs squashed beyond efficient breathing
bloated and alone
I am waiting for the gush
the tearing of some expected membrane
that will force me to push forth
your profound babble
I am told your landing will show me
how much I don’t already know
will usher me to go where so many women
have gone/willing/unwilling
the tyranny of motherhood
has always been used as tool
to highlight out women’s inadequacies
never mind how gargantuan the push
to make life from that rush of red needed
to sustain life/make me better/you stronger
your movement inside me stills my tongue
my pen is all I am able to move
in these last days
together
we transform into some alien magic
beautiful and grotesque
we become some science experiment
the cosmos created/amazing and banal
because dogs do it
hogs do it
elephants everywhere angle their bodies
muddy with effort
they rip themselves to make passage
for what makes us creatures of survival
reproduction
replication of a self/narcissistic
our desire for our features reflected
human from one generation to the next
with gestation almost done
I still don’t understand
how we do it
nearly ten months(I cannot imagine why they tell us nine)
forty weeks/weak with the ungraceful details
of constipation
incontinence
vomiting and the urge to spit
constantly/some women do it again
and again
I lift my womb to them
artful Amazons arching the arrow of ovaries
to shoot patriarchy in the balls
more than once
no matter how they want to
male bodies are unable to do it
lions
tigers
or tyrants with dicks
do not possess the equipment to eject a child
fully formed
into the collective wisdom of our flawed existence
only women
with little less than a thimbleful of sperm
can carry the burden of bearer
such men must be jealous
or mad
may be why the weakest among them
call us the weaker sex
speak of us in derogatory terms
so firm are they in their deficient diction
they cast state-supported aspersions
on the abilities of daughters
and sisters
grandmothers who remain mothers
two and three times removed
men who know nothing of fibroids
and uterine cancers
of contractions or crowning
look at the blood
spilling monthly from my cunt
and decree to scorn me
adorn me with the smallest parts of the harvest
behind the camouflage of unconstitutional laws
they pay me less/yearly/hourly
compensation for my labor
dropping daily
under the duress of misogyny
and still some women are forced to do this
even when they don’t want to
by people
who care nothing
for the children who are borne
by these illegal proclamations
these people know
whoever controls the production of labor
controls the world and its wealth
health care is where the battle for women’s bodies
should begin and end
so men
with no first-hand knowledge of pregnancy
no experience of birthing children
tell us where to go
when to go
what pill we can take to prevent conception
the months before
the morning after
they decide which medications are illegal
at what age
Priests who are really
old men in dresses/straight/jackets
young men who write checks
and balance the business of birthing
babies/everything plugs into a matrix
of dollars and no good sense
to them our eggs are only currency
to be traded on a global market for profit
everyday
we are made victims of one crime or the other
perpetuated by those in places drunk with power
and still we choose do this
everyday
we grow large with hope
heave and heft our pelvic bones
toward the future of our species
often in blood and feces
we writhe with screams and sorrow
our joy mixed in with our most primal urges
we commit to bearing
all this
with the belief that humanity
is more than the sum of our collective failure
we still look to the days ahead
expecting more
from our children
the men/women they will become
we open our legs
our hearts
our arms
we open the most vulnerable parts of who we are
to keep doing this
generation after generation
bleeding/amniotic/umbilical
we splay our limbs to connect the dead
with the yet to be born
we do it
knowing there is more to being human
than this bloody evidence
smearing what remains of our errors
we arch or backs
and push
we blend magic and madness
making people
one liver
one kidney
one cranium
one heart beating
meaningful and rhythmic
one baby at a time
Love x 100.
The Hundred Names of Love
The children have gone to bed. We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly behind our eyes and sleep mid-word, sleep standing warm among the creatures in the barn, lean together and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet, the forgiveness of that sleep.
Then the one small cry: one strike of the match-head of sound: one child’s voice: and the hundred names of love are lit as we rise and walk down the hall.
One hundred nights we wake like this, wake out of our nowhere to kneel by small beds in darkness. One hundred flowers open in our hands, a name for love written in each one.
-Annie Lighthart