Poems That Make Grown Women Cry by Anthony Holden & Ben Holden

Author:Anthony Holden & Ben Holden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The award-winning Irish writer Edna O’Brien has published eighteen novels, from The Country Girls (1960) to The Little Red Chairs (2015). Her other works include five plays, eight collections of short stories, two volumes of poetry and four works of non-fiction, including studies of Joyce and Byron, as well as a memoir, Country Girl (2012).

Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward

ANNE SEXTON (1928–74)

JACKIE KAY

When I was seventeen, this poem made me cry. I remember: my first year at Stirling University, my tutor Grahame Smith asked us each to pick a poem that we liked and read it to the class. We were then supposed to analyse it. By the time I got to the last lines ‘trembling the selves we lose/ Go child, who is my sin and nothing more’ I was blubbing. I blurted out: I just find it so moving and was unable to say anything more, swallowing fiercely. I was annoyed and embarrassed having made a fool of myself in front of my brand new fellow students, but Grahame Smith seemed sympathetic and not a stranger to the way that poems can provoke tears. ‘Unknown Girl’ made me think of how difficult it must have been for my birth mother – the mother here, like mine most probably, chooses the only way – survival – in the stormiest of seas (‘I am a shore rocking you off’) in order that the baby has a chance in life. But it also made me think of belonging – ‘bone at my bone’ – and of the process of un-belonging that must begin the moment the poem ends, the familiarity that will turn into strangeness; the mother who will become a relative stranger. It was the first poem that I remember reading that was openly about adoption, and that tackled head on secrets and lies, society’s labelling of so-called bastards and the feeling of the world’s disapproval – in this case all the ward. She has a keen sense of being watched in the poem, and her own conscience seems to be watching too. Even all these years later, I am still undone by ‘Unknown Girl’, heartbroken for the mother, for her tender love for her baby, her ‘funny kin’, for all the mothers in whatever circumstances who lose their babies. It was the first poem that made me realize I could write about adoption.

Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward

Child, the current of your breath is six days long.

You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;

lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong

at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed

with love. At first hunger is not wrong.

The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded

down starch halls with the other unnested throng

in wheeling baskets. You tip like a cup; your head

moving to my touch. You sense the way we belong.

But this is an institution bed.

You will not know me very long.

The doctors are enamel. They want to know

the facts. They guess about the man who left me,

some pendulum soul, going the way men go

and leave you full of child.

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