The Abortion

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Just as the earth puckered its mouth, each bud 
puffing out from its knot, I changed my shoes, and 
then drove south.

Up past the Blue Mountains, where Pennsylvania 
humps on endlessly, wearing, like a crayoned cat, its 
green hair,

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard; where, in 
truth, the ground cracks evilly', a dark socket from 
which the coal has poured,

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

the grass as bristly and stout as chives, and me 
wondering when the ground would break, and me 
wondering how anything fragile survives;

up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man, not 
Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all . . . he took the fullness 
that love began.

Returning north, even the sky grew thin like a high 
window looking nowhere. The road was as flat as a 
sheet of tin.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without 
death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this 
baby that I bleed.

Anne Sexton c. 1963

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