Trigger warning: pregnancy loss
June 2008 – 20 weeks
There was sunshine on the day you left
spring summersaulting to summer
and optimism,
but you’d gone
and I didn’t know
I carried imaginings
future selves, with ice cream, on beaches…
my motherhood – calmer, stronger, wiser,
Not a woman who didn’t know
she had a belly full of corpse
Then they said, with their machines
and uniforms,
‘This is not what we’d hope to see’
and I realised they meant death:
hope had flown away
Acceptance was slow:
even though you whispered ‘not now’
and stopped, I still carried your transparent bones,
a penance for my hopes
and ineffective physiology
Photo by Anders Jildén on Unsplash
