My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.
I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
—Margaret Atwood
Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a woman and a writer, both. Either is an exhausting job, and to be both seems impossible. And I keep thinking about Adrienne Rich, who supposedly argued in Of Woman Born that until a woman can walk away from a pregnancy like a man can, we should be allowed reproductive rights. (I haven’t read Of Woman Born yet.) Or Judith Ortiz Cofer, who writes in “The Woman Who Slept with One Eye Open” that she started “going to bed when [her] daughter did and rising at 5:00 a.m.” every morning to write. Motherhood seems so impossible, especially if you’re a writer.
But here is Atwood, writing ”A child is not a poem,/a poem is not a child./there is no either/or.” She says everything I suspect but cannot articulate, and she says it beautifully. I think for me, I’ll have to make a decision eventually, and I’ll have to make it work: “there is no either/or.”
Again, poetry says what I cannot.
-R
