Childless Woman
The womb Rattles its pod, the moon Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go. My landscape is a hand with no lines, The roads bunched to a knot, The knot myself, Myself the rose you acheive--- This body, This ivory Ungodly as a child's shriek. Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, Loyal to my image, Uttering nothing but blood--- Taste it, dark red! And my forest My funeral, And this hill and this Gleaming with the mouths of corpses.
Childless Woman - meaning Summary
Infertility and Bodily Grief
The poem confronts involuntary childlessness through stark, violent bodily images. The speaker presents her infertile womb and altered body as a landscape of knots, shrieks, blood, and funerary imagery, expressing grief, alienation, and disrupted identity. Rather than consoling, the voice claims loyalty to a reflected, monstrous self and registers loss as both physical and existential. The overall effect is a compact, intense meditation on reproductive failure and its psychological aftermath.
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