For Tammy:
Breathe in the deep full depth of our love Gather our strength around you like a cloak.
We are your sisters, bonded in blood.
Our screams join your own until they reach the heavens and bring back light.
How brave
How hard
How wonderful
You are a mother, bearer of life.
What could be more powerful a miracle
The universe contracts
Life begins
For Amy:
The roundness of your belly contains the universe
Breathe in the wildness of the wind
Grasp hold of the heat of the sun
Fire burns as sure as grass will grow
Feel the cool solid soil beneath your feet
Dig in your toes and draw in the sweetness of the day
Your belly expands and contracts wresting new life into existence
All the hope and love 3 hearts can bring
Wrapped up in a warm little ball
Pain and joy coalesce
The world opens wide to let out a sigh
Simone is born
Submitted by Susan
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Bloomington Birth Stories is a project of Bloomington Area Birth Services (aka BABS). BABS offers a variety of childbirth classes, prenatal and postpartum yoga, breastfeeding support, postpartum support groups, drop-in parent-baby playtime, and information about midwives, birth and postpartum doulas, and local birth resources.
A Celebration of Birth
- Bloomington Birth Stories
- Bloomington, Indiana
- We invite BABS clients to share birth stories, birth announcements, reflections on birth, or birth art. To submit your story, just email it to us at babs@bloomington.in.us, with any photos you'd like to include. For your privacy, use first names only and refrain from identifying your health care giver by name.
2 comments:
A Poem by Maya Angelou*
Mother told her secrets to me
When I rode
Low in the pocket
Between her hips.
I learned the rhythm of her song
"Child, this world is not your home."
History does not dissolve
In the blood.
All my ways of being are musical and mysterious.
Yet I embrace you openly.
Ripe with expectancy.
My eyes, reflecting the Limpid Limpopo
Look beyond the past
For my children whose future rest on the closed eyelids.
Centuries have recorded my features, in Cafes and Cathedrals, along the water's edge.
I awaited the arrival the ships of freedom
On the selling stage as men proved their power in a handful of my thigh.
Across my peach flesh lips I blow river boats on the skin of the Mississippi.
And feluccas up the ancient Nile.
Clouds race from my peanut butter colored puffed cheeks.
My breasts
Are the fulness of mangos
In a royal forest
Constant, swaying, jungle flowers.
My impertinent buttocks
High, redolent, tight as dark drums
Send the wind to shake tall grasses
Introduce frenzy into the hearts of small men.
From the columns of my thighs
I take the strength to hold the world aloft
Standing, too often, with a cloud of loneliness
Forming halos for my head.
Oaks, massive with the memory of Lynch
Perversions, bend to grip my knees and rustle
A moan for our burned visions.
The trees may weep. I stiffen my back
Quieten my face and teach a lesson in Grace.
I do get tired and wonder
When my change is going to come.
But if the Lord says so
And the creek don't rise I know
I'll get better, better.
What I have not seen cannot be.
Sunsets and rainbows, green forest and restive blue seas, all naturally colored things are my siblings. We have played together on the floor of the world
Since the first stone looked up
At the stars.
Innocence, as riches, plates my
Skin all carats gold, beckons
Lust and leers and on the delicious occasion my lover whose talent convinces me away from fear.
My hair, a hive of honey bees
Is a queenly glory
Crackles like castanets
Hums like marimbas.
Oh my movement admits to
Lip smacking, finger snapping, toe tapping
Shoulder bouncing, hip throwing, breast thrusting, eye flashing,
Love of good and God and Life.
My songs wreathe the people in banners
Of hope, of wisdom and some just plain laughing out loud.
I know the near and distant peaks
Ridges and crevices, aretes and tors
Valleys, chasms, gulleys of which I am made
Are strewn with remorse, pain triumph and ecstasy.
I am mate to Kilimanjaro
Fujiyama, Mont Blanc and Sister to Everest
He who is daring and brave will know what to do.
What a great helpful post I like this.
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