The lost Baby Poem

The speaker of this poem is a mother that has just had an abortion. In the begging she tells of what she has done, and in the next stanza she describes what “could” have come for his unborn baby. Like the last Clifton poem I had read there was no particular rhyme scheme. There was no particular rhythm to the poem either. It was simply a mother telling her story. This is important in making poem more personal, like the reader gets to witness a mother telling her unborn child why she had ended her life so early.

The syntax of this poem is very important to note. Like many of Clifton’s poems, there are no periods or commas, and none of the personal nouns are capitalized. The poem in my opinion could be interpreted many different ways, I believe it is about a mother that has gone through an abortion. I think the I’s are not capitalized for two reasons. One even though the poem is about the justification for the abortion, I can still feel a sense of remorse the mother is feeling. Like many women after they get an abortion, she may not feel like she is worth being capitalized. She also many have kept the I’s lowercase so that they were not so personal, to make the statement that there are many mothers of her time that must do this to supposedly save their children. Another part of the syntax that’s stands out in this poem is the large spaces that are in the second and third stanza’s. In line 7-8”In the year of the disconnected gas and no car We would have made the thin walk over Genesee Hill into Canada wind..”. These spaces are important because when I read the poem, I could hear the mother talking, and at these spaces is where she needed to take a short pause to collect herself.

Another important literary device in this poem is diction. “the time i dropped your almost body down” (line1) The important word in this line is almost. The first time I read this poem I thought the mother had had her child and then drowned her. However there are many small clues that suggest that she had an abortion and the reference to drowning is just a piece of her that was once a part of her is now lost, dead, drowned. Another hint is in line 7 “You would have been born into winter”. The key word being would. The last word that gets across that the mother got an abortion is in the last stanza. In line 16 she says” If I am ever less than a mountain for tour definite brothers and sisters” The word definite is important because it means that they were real, they had been born. Also, in the last two lines it says “Let black men call me stranger always for your never named sake.” From the references of the city and under the river and traveling to Canada, I got the feeling that this particular mother lived in some ghetto in New York. The entire poem is her trying to justify why she got an abortion. I think the black men are the black pastors of her local church, and since she got an abortion they are not going to acknowledge her existence.

This poem is more personal to me because I am strongly against abortion. She spent most of the poem trying to defend herself. Her reasons are worthless. There is no good reason to “drown” a child. Her reasons were all speculation, she had no idea what was to come she only assumed it was going to be a harsh winter. But it was because of her bad decision making that she was in that situation in the first place. I thought it was interesting that in the first stanza she relates the abortion to the low rivers of the sea, and she ends with references to a mountain. She hopes to be mountain for her children that she chose to have, but if she isn’t she thinks she might as well drown as well.