The latest rash of babies turning up
in dumpsters has hit the city news
and made me sick again. I am losing patience
with these women who can’t take the child
to a church hospital fire station or
just an old fashioned basket at a neighbors’
door. What’s wrong with this mess that
it’s being repeated over and over
while the anchorwoman reports—Baby Doe
found yesterday is still in serious condition
but is expected to make it.—Make what?
A happy holiday in some foster home
that won’t mind if the plastic bags cut off
oxygen and hope from a new brain needing
to find a way out of the trash,
some kind of receiving blanket besides
old newspapers and banana peels?
I’m trying to keep my compassion up,
trying to imagine the vacant logic that
even for a moment though it was a good idea
to treat some little person who had so
recently emerged as garbage.
3 comments:
I think you may be sacrificing some poetic power to your own emotional response. It seems a little straightforward in delivery, a little too "think of the children." I can see the bones of a very powerful piece here, but it needs some shaping.
Thanks for the observation, Karla. I intend working this piece to focus on language shifting the tone to 'think' of the women's state of mind. This is a first draft, as happens when I'm writing new daily. Just my thoughts after the late news.
I think with poems/situations like this, its important to work through the outrage/despair that caused the poem to be written in the first place.
This poem, as that expression of emotion, is breathlessly sad & mad and leaves Myra with lots of options for the next draft...
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