My poem, "New Birth" is an homage to Toi Derricotte and her collection, "Natural Birth". There are few enough transcendent moments in life. One was when I heard Toi read -- not read but incant -- from her first book of poetry. There are works that you write, and there are works that insist on being written. "Natural Birth" was one of those books. By the time she did the reading I attended the books had been out for a few years, the experience which forged the poems was decades old. Yet I watched a now affluent (having married a banker), middle-aged woman be seized by the memories of giving birth when she was a young unmarried woman.
(i.)
The nurses did not
Want me to see her but I
Scream and they relent.
(ii.)
They never look like
You wish
She?, no exception
White where black was meant.
(iii.)
Baby on my tit
In bed motherhood’s a breeze
Nurse brings me my sleep.
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