Rafael, “Portrait of a Pregnant Woman”
Here’s a Judith Wright pregnancy poem for my daughter-in-law Candice, who gave birth to Etta last month, and to Elizabeth Applegate, my colleague in the French department who is due in June. Spring is a good time for such poems.
I love Wright’s idea of escaping and not escaping, which calls to mind Wordsworth’s Intimation of Immortality. No matter how far inland we journey from our mother’s womb, we will always “have sight of that immortal sea/Which brought us thither.” Or as Wright puts it, “I am the stem that fed the fruit,/the link that joins you to the night.”
Woman to Child
By Judith Wright
You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me;
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood.
There moved the multitudinous stars,
and colored birds and fishes moved.
There swam the sliding continents.
All time lay rolled in me, and sense,
and love that knew not its beloved.
O node and focus of the world;
I hold you deep within that well
you shall escape and not escape—
that mirrors still your sleeping shape;
that nurtures still your crescent cell.
I wither and you break from me;
yet though you dance in living light
I am the earth, I am the root,
I am the stem that fed the fruit,
the link that joins you to the night.