Was I the child you lost before my birth,
a babe reborn, whose spirit comes and goes
from womb to womb, a changeling bound to earth,
unhallowed tomb to cradle all your woes?
In 'sixty-four, you bore without a choice.
“O soul of child unformed,” you penned in verse.
“Unworthy web of pain,” objects your voice.
You wished your body would become my hearse.
O mother, brother Terry found you wrote
that germ miscarried when your husband left.
Entrapped within a psychiatric moat,
you craved the beat of tiny feet bereft.
O Mom, each poem brings forgiving hope,
inspiring rhymes and runes that help me cope.
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Author Notes
The photo depicts my father Fred Wilson's sculpture "Woe is Me!" in which a mother grieves her stillborn baby. I quoted words from my mother Jessie Wilson's same-titled poem in which she wishes her unborn baby dies. Given that my parents created these works the year I was born, I felt they addressed me when she wrote:
"Forgive me . . . forgive me if I feel no sin, but if you're lost, you'll come again . . ."
Knowing that my mother suffered a miscarriage which landed her in a psychiatric ward five years before my birth, I address her poem.
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