POEM - ODE TO THE EMBRYO THAT MY T-SHAPED UTERUS MISCARRIED

BARBARA LEONHARD  ( USA)


Barbara Leonhard is the author of the best-selling Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir (EIF, 2022) and co-author with Nolcha Fox of Too Much Fun To Be Legal (Garden of Neuro, 2024). Both books are available on Amazon. Barbara has received nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the Editor of MasticadoresUSA. You can follow her on her Wordpress blog: Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver.


ODE TO THE EMBRYO THAT MY T-SHAPED UTERUS MISCARRIED

You left my broken womb
as the bloody remains of what
was never to come. I still feel you
in the waves, the flow
of my sacral river - your tears?
Your fears I’ve abandoned you?
No, Honey. No! I’ll never forget you.
The t-shaped womb
couldn’t hold your brilliance.
Your tiny, beautiful self,
washed away. Your light
sparkles in each of my cells.
My core, your forever home.
Your essence, my creative labor
in verse and art.
Everyone says, “Forget the dead.”
I can’t leave my baby
screaming in her forever crib.
Or my young miss alone
in harm’s way on grief’s edge.
Though never delivered
into my arms, you shelter
in my wound of wanting. Each night,
I press my scar against a pillow
to swaddle you in your mother’s heat.
In dreams, we share the sacred skiff,
and together, wind up and up
out of the wake
of the wound
into a newborn sky.



Prepared Angela Kosta Executive Director of MIRIADE Magazine, Academic, journalist, writer, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, translator, promoter