Baby as Muse? NOT

I’m vacuuming the kitchen floor when I see the word “WOMB” staring up at me amidst the cereal scum.  It’s a piece of the “MOTHERHOOD MAGNETIC POETRY KIT” that I got for Christmas.

The kit should have been a great fit, since I’m a mother and a (former) poet.  But somehow I haven’t been inspired to compose any brief lyrics on the refrigerator.  I’m always opening and closing that white door, on a mission for something– anything– to feed my children. I’m  often distressed at the meagre contents and moldy leftovers, vowing that soon I will take everything out and wipe down the whole appliance– but I’m NOT pondering how best to rearrange these “motherly” words in a poem:

“Home, Van, Nap, Laugh, She, Crib,” etc.

I did manage to put together the phrase “Worry Instruction.”

Also:  ”Take Her Super Diaper.”

But that’s not poetry.  I don’t write poems anymore, although mother-writers before me have done so brilliantly.  Take Sylvia Plath, “Nick and the Candlestick”:

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

You are the baby in the barn.

Or Lucille Clifton and her small transcendent poems that she said she could fit into her distracted train of thought.  Some mother wrote poems on sheets of toilet paper, but I can't remember who.

Me, I vacuumed up the word “WOMB” and it felt good to suck that little magnetic piece up the hose into the bag.

Tags:   magnetic poetry · motherhood · Sylvia Plath1 Comment