Choice Words Read online

  pole.

  This pale face, this series of faces

  that comes now

  a spermy cloud

  to cover Her.

  I will spend my life walking

  your borders

  these land masses broken

  for you, these continents

  and their drift.

  I will wash you in the great mourning

  in the great morning sea

  of the East Pacific Rise

  I will lose you

  in the nightsea

  of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

  You will be unknown

  in the Westwind Drift

  PRAYER TO THE SPIRIT

  Starhawk

  To release the spirit to find a new entry into life2

  Spirit, spirit,

  I have sent you back

  across the gate.

  How sorry I am

  To close my womb to you,

  but I am not the one

  to bring you to birth.

  I light this candle for you

  to light your way

  as you search for the womb

  that is meant to bear you.

  Here are wombs that are open,

  here are women whose arms

  ache for a child.

  [Name the women you know

  who want to have a child.]

  Each will light a candle for you.

  May you choose wisely.

  May you come to birth in joy.

  the lost baby poem

  Lucille Clifton

  the time i dropped your almost body down

  down to meet the waters under the city

  and run one with the sewage to the sea

  what did i know about waters rushing back

  what did i know about drowning

  or being drowned

  you would have been born into winter

  in the year of the disconnected gas

  and no car we would have made the thin

  walk over genesee hill into the canada wind

  to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands

  you would have fallen naked as snow into winter

  if you were here i could tell you these

  and some other things

  if i am ever less than a mountain

  for your definite brothers and sisters

  let the rivers pour over my head

  let the sea take me for a spiller

  of seaslet Black men call me stranger

  alwaysfor your never named sake

  ABORTION CHILD

  Jean Valentine

  I thought:

  You live somewhere

  deeper than the well

  I live down in.

  Deeper than anything from me or him.

  No but it took me

  time to see you, thirty earth years.

  “FIRE SECTION” FROM ABORTION: A HEALING RITUAL

  Minerva Earthschild and Vibra Willow

  INTRODUCTION

  This ritual is intended to create a healing space for women who have had one or more abortions and to acknowledge and work with the spiritual aspects of the experience. Through our own abortion experiences, we came to reject the dichotomy of abortion politics that would require women to choose between two beliefs: that pregnancy is a miracle, the fetus’s life is sacred, and therefore abortion is wrong; or that pregnancy is merely a physical event, the fetus is just a mass of tissue, and therefore abortion is insignificant. As feminists and pagans, we believe that women are literally a gateway between the worlds and that abortion is a responsible exercise of the sacred power of choice. Using Wiccan practices and feminist process, we have designed this ritual for women wishing to heal from their abortion experiences and to reclaim sacred power in their reproductive choices…

  … FIRE

  After the stories have all been told, it is time to release those deeper feelings of anger, rage, shame, and judgment that have kept us bound and powerless, that have prevented our healing. The content of this phase of the ritual varies, depending on the needs of the women in the group and the common threads among the stories. If many women told of multiple abortions, perhaps this is the pattern or bond that needs to be broken. If women expressed a great deal of anger or rage against the men in their stories, this could be released.

  Place the unlit cauldron in the center. Invite the women to speak or shout into the cauldron, at the same time rather than in turns, what it is that they want to release or have transformed. It is often helpful to speak the hurtful words that have been spoken to us about our abortions: “How could you be so careless, so stupid, so irresponsible, so selfish?” You’ve had how many abortions? Three? Four?” “Abortion isn’t a form of birth control, you know!” “Murderer! Baby-killer!” And so on. Just as each of us has our own story, we each have experienced different (but similar) forms of condemnation for our abortions.

  When all of the women have completed this speaking, their voices will rise and blend into wailing, keening, moaning, and or sounds of fury and rage. Let this build and fall. Be sure to ground this energy, dropping down and touching the floor or earth. Next bind the wrists of each woman snugly with one or two strands of the thread. As you are binding each woman’s wrists, talk about the meaning of bonds, both the negative and positive. Bonds can keep us caught in patterns of thinking or behavior that do not serve us, that inhibit our creative energies. Bonds can also connect us to other women who have had the same experiences we have had and who can help us in our healing. Many of us have felt bound in some way to “choose” abortion.

  When all of the women have been bound, light the cauldron. When each woman is ready, she can break her bonds and throw them into the cauldron, perhaps shouting what it is that she is releasing. Begin a chant and wild dance around the cauldron, transforming the negative messages, thoughts, and patterns into power. Raise a cone of power over the cauldron. Ground the energy. The women may experience changes in their feelings about their abortion stories, so some time should be allowed for sharing these shifts.

  AN ABORTION

  Frank O’Hara

  Do not bathe her in blood,

  the little one whose sex is

  undermined, she drops leafy

  across the belly of black

  sky and her abyss has not

  that sweetness of the March

  wind. Her conception ached

  with the perversity of nursery

  rhymes, she was a shad a

  snake a sparrow and a girl’s

  closed eye. At the supper, weeping,

  they said let’s have her and

  at breakfast: no.

  Don’t bathe

  her in tears, guileless, beguiled

  in her peripheral warmth, more

  monster than murdered, safe

  in all silences. From our tree

  dropped, that she not wither,

  autumn in our terrible breath.

  FROM “PRINCIPLES OF MIDWIFERY,” FROM MY NOTORIOUS LIFE

  Kate Manning

  I went along now on Mrs. Evans’s good days when she took me out to help her in the bedrooms of the city, where women labored and dropped their infants worse than rabbits, night and day. The Bible says in sorrow she shall bring forth children, but sorrow is a quiet humor and my apprenticeship was not quiet. I heard noises from girls like cats being killed. Worse. The battle of Gettysburg where boys was gored through by swords and felled by cannons was surely a match for the sounds of agony as came from these rooms of mothers laboring, and the slicks of blood was so equally sanguinary that you would expect Morrigan, the fairy of war, to land on dark crow’s wings by the side of every female in confinement. Before I reached the age of seventeen, I knew the rudiments of my trade just by watching and listening and placing my hands where Mrs. Evans tutored me to place them. I reached in and helped along a breech boy to be born, his little red feet emerging and his chin stuck somewhere up the chimney so I worried wou
ld his head snap off. I seen mothers give birth drunk as sots and I seen them quaff the Sanative Serum like it was cider. I seen twins delivered, and an infant born with a caul, filmy as the skin off steamed milk, veiling the face. Its mother put that filament aside in a tobacco tin saying she would sell it to a sailor.

  —A caul will save you from drowning, said Mrs. Evans.

  She tutored me always. While I was helping out with the births I wasn’t yet allowed to assist her in the premature deliveries for the Obstruction, but she had me observe and listen to her narration as she scraped a blocked woman called Mrs. Torrington who had eight children already and observed again as she de-obstructed another broken-down nag, Mrs. Selby, who had seven boys. Neither one could afford another squalling child, and both of these ladies no matter how much My Teacher hurt them only thanked her in the end. It was my sorry task to empty the bowl and on one of these occasions I seen amidst the gore a pale delicate outline of a form such as what you see in the smashed egg of a sparrow, not bigger than a thumbnail.

  —What’s wrong with you? cried Mrs. Evans when she seen my woeful face.

  —It’s been killed.

  —It was never alive, said she quite firmly, and dragged me home to her Bible where she pointed me out a lesson from King Solomon and said,—Ponder it.

  If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, but his soul is not satisfied with good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, Better the miscarriage than he, for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity; and its name is covered in obscurity. It never sees the sun and it never knows anything; it is better off than he.

  And she ordered me to go look in the street at the poor wee bundles of rags having their childhood in the alleyways of the Bend and ask myself what was meant by Charity and to read the verses of Ecclesiastes again, so I did:

  Behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them. So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil that is done under the sun.

  Under sun and moon both, Mrs. Evans schooled me about evil and good and the practicalities of administering them and all remedies in between. A few drops of opium will save the mother pain. Palpation of the belly will determine a breech presentation. A glassful of spirits will restart a stopped labor. If by feel you determine the head is rotated wrongly coax the mother on her side and push with the hands to turn the child. If the face is presenting place one hand within and the other without, and push inside to tuck the chin, while outside pressing the head forward by a stroking motion across the belly. Small hands is a blessing. A steady hand is a blessing. A firm hand is a blessing. A warm heart is and so is a soft voice. Mrs. Evans had these all, whereas my heart was guarded and my voice was mostly silent. I watched and listened and did what I was told.

  —You will see mothers die of prolapse where the u****s falls right out, Mrs. Evans said. You will see them die when the child is stuck in the canal. Mothers will die of fever and they will die of hemorrhage. Their soft parts will rip and tear. They will die just of exhaustion.—And remember, she said,—till you have a child of your own, no woman will accept you for a midwife alone.

  I went along to thirty births. Sixteen boys and fourteen girls. The mothers moaned and carried on but when they were through most of them smiled and looked down at their raw new infants with wet eyes glinting.—It’s a beautiful gift of God, Mrs. Evans said, her own eyes crinkled with wonder.—Such a wonder.

  And it was. As disgusting as the Blessed Event seemed to me at first, I soon was dumbstruck at the power and workings of the female machine and never got tired of the drama and the miracle, even when I seen Mrs. Kissling die in her husband’s arms, her newborn wailing, not even when I seen a mongoloid. I saw all manner of effluvia manufactured by the feminine anatomy, including blood, the Liquor amnii, p*** and s***, vernix and vomit. Plus, all manner of womanly afflictions, swellings, growths, lacerations, fistula, bruises, and the burns of a cigar. But the worst I ever saw was left on the doorstep.

  CHRISTMAS CAROLS

  Margaret Atwood

  Children do not always mean

  hope. To some they mean despair.

  This woman with her hair cut off

  so she could not hang herself

  threw herself from a rooftop, thirty

  times raped & pregnant by the enemy

  who did this to her. This one had her pelvis

  broken by hammers so the child

  could be extracted. Then she was thrown away,

  useless, a ripped sack. This one

  punctured herself with kitchen skewers

  and bled to death on a greasy

  oilcloth table, rather than bear

  again and past the limit. There

  is a limit, though who knows

  when it may come? Nineteenth-century

  ditches are littered with small wax corpses

  dropped there in terror. A plane

  swoops too low over the fox farm

  and the mother eats her young. This too

  is Nature. Think twice then

  before you worship turned furrows, or pay

  lip service to some full belly

  or other, or single out one girl to play

  the magic mother, in blue

  & white, up on that pedestal,

  perfect & intact, distinct

  from those who aren’t. Which means

  everyone else. It’s a matter

  of food & available blood. If mother

  hood is sacred, put

  your money where your mouth is. Only

  then can you expect the coming

  down to the wrecked & shimmering earth

  of that miracle you sing

  about, the day

  when every child is a holy birth.

  NICOLETTE

  Colette Inez

  Nicolette, my little carrot,

  I pull you out of the dark ground

  of Pennsylvania

  where they blasted my thighs

  and scraped your seed away.

  You are twelve, my counterpart child

  breathlessly running into rooms

  with acorns and leaves

  you want to arrange

  for the most senseless beauty.

  I have married your father.

  We are reconciled to minus signs.

  The moist kiss you give me

  comes from the forest

  of a dark time;

  anthracite in the earth,

  old signals from the stars

  when I walked away from the kill,

  blood on my legs, a phrase to caulk

  the falling walls in a universe

  moving light years away

  from our promises.

  Nicolette, we will meet

  in my poem and when the light

  calls your name

  you will rise like a fern

  to live all summer long,

  a green integer

  in a pure equation of song.

  FROM “LILY’S ABORTION IN THE ROOM OF STATUES,” IN AMONG THE GODDESSES

  Annie Finch

  […] So those statues were my companions

  two more nights, and three more days,

  as my hunger and sickness kept me

  weak but wakeful. I could see them,

  dozens, watching me with eyes,

  squatting goddesses, with children or alone,

  alabaster, or dark burned stone,

  mouths sometimes open, sometimes in pain,

  chipped out hollows shadowing distance,

  inset eyes of turquoise staring

  from attenuated heights.

  And the queen of heaven, Inanna,

  never left my eyes alone;

  hard on the beams of her ey
es I went downward

  till that day passed, and evening came,

  and into the second night’s solitude

  there rose another, terrible queen.

  She stood over me with the height of a murderer,

  her hand on my belly, her voice in my blood,

  while Inanna watched me without one movement.

  Till the dawn came, I felt that hand

  burning, and I knew the flame

  was spinning, heavy, out from her forehead,

  resting between my eyes like new wisdom,

  as my pregnancy shrank and contracted.

  Inanna had taken me to the vision,

  and she held me there till it was over,

  under Ereshkigal’s hand. They all saw me

  as death moved through me, and I took a life,

  so many of them, without pity or fear,

  massed on the shelves with their eyes wide open.

  By the third morning, weak and thirsty,

  no longer nauseous, I lay in a daze,

  waiting for Kali. I waited till evening,

  with Inanna’s eyes on me, steady

  as the sun she ruled ruled the day,

  and stopped at dusk. All I wanted was there,

  day and its lover, night and its lover,

  brought by Inanna. They healed the pain.

  In the gray light, I left the room.

  CHAPEL OF FORGIVENESS

  Cathleen Calbert

  In San Francisco, my mother goes

  to Chinatown for tea or ginseng,

  silk change purses, black canvas shoes.

  She stops in to pray at Old St. Mary’s

  if she’s tired, so it wasn’t surprising

  she proposed doing so with me.

  After our stacks of saucers had been

  assessed by the waitress, and we’d paid

  for our dim sum, the little bits of heart

  we ate in the shape of shrimps

  rolled in white rice dough, slippery

  pork baos, and sweet black seed cakes,

  we ascended the steps, feeling our way

  in the dark entry to those dual chapels:

  “Of Forgiveness,” “Of Repentance.”