I imagine you pushing your way out,
landing on the strange planet
of my exhausted body, eyes shut
against the world’s harsh light.
I would have held you, fed you
with myself, my cradling hand
huge around you, my nipples
dark with motherhood.
Would I have wanted you?
Would love have alighted on us
without effort, or would we
have strained to find one another?
I might have failed you, turned away
and left you lonely, your life spent missing
the safe place you could never go back to.
I might not have known what to do.
I can’t tell who you might have been,
if conceiving you might have made me
new to myself, if, as you grew inside me,
I too might have flowered.
If you are there, my lost possibility,
somewhere in the world of things
that weren’t to be, let’s thank each other
for the harm we never did.
“For me, not having had children it isn’t an all-encompassing loss in the way it is for some women. This poem recognises both the sadness of not being a mother and the suffering that can sometimes be part of the mother-child relationship.”
Susan Jordan has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has been writing poetry seriously since 2014. She has published two full-length collections and two pamphlets – A House of Empty Rooms (Indigo Dreams), I never think dark will come (Oversteps Books), Last of the Line (Maytree Press) and Tasting the Sweet Cold (Mudlark Press). Her work has also appeared in various magazines and anthologies. Her novel The Box has just been published by Palewell Press.