A rose is a rose is a rose

^ sorry about that

Trst

Pre-nostalgia, what a great term

Spot on

My children take the piss out of me because we always do things ‘for the last time’ and then generally do it again

I don’t want to miss any of the last times!

Difference of opinion - Wendy Cope

Rachel Irischild, who Empress linked upthread, wrote quite a similar poem.

https://irischild.blogspot.com/2017/08/he-tells-her-after-wendy-cope.html?m=1

[quote Waitwhat23]@Fernlake sometimes when I'm cuddling my baby, I'm hit with a wave of what suppose I would call 'pre-nostalgia', in that I know the moment will slip away soon when she's that weight, that height, that smell and it'll just be a memory. Both poems above 'Her First Week' and 'Beattie is Three' made me feel like that.[/quote]
Yes, that's exactly it!

Pre-nostalgia, what a great term.

@Fernlake sometimes when I'm cuddling my baby, I'm hit with a wave of what suppose I would call 'pre-nostalgia', in that I know the moment will slip away soon when she's that weight, that height, that smell and it'll just be a memory. Both poems above 'Her First Week' and 'Beattie is Three' made me feel like that.

Difference of opinion - Wendy Cope

HE TELLS HER
He tells her that the earth is flat —
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.
The planet goes on being round.

I did have an inkling 😀 but he came 15 days early

non

Adrian Mitchell

One of the readings at ds1 naming ceremony was by joyce grenfell

Ordinary Morning, by Joyce Grenfell

It felt like an ordinary morning,
It began an ordinary way,
And then, without warning
Ordinary morning became extraordinary day.

Hadn’t the slightest sort of inkling,
No-one said love was on its way,
And then within a twinkling,
Without the smallest inkling,
It became an extraordinary day.

For there you were,
And the whole world stood still.
There you were,
I loved you then, and I always will.

At first, an ordinary morning,
Began in an ordinary way,
And then my heart was beating
At this ordinary meeting
And we both knew
This was not an ordinary day.

It was when she first met her husband i think but worked equally well (i think) for the morning you wake up as a woman (albeit pregnant) and go to sleep as a mother

@Nonmaquillee thank you for the book recommendation - it sounds wonderful. I'm going to keep an eye out for it

This poem is entitled Her First Week and it's by Sharon Olds. It really touched my heart when my first child was a tiny baby, and I still find it really poignant:

She was so small I would scan the crib a half-second
to find her, face-down in a corner, limp
as something gently flung down, or fallen
from some sky an inch above the mattress. I would
tuck her arm along her side
and slowly turn her over. She would tumble
over part by part, like a load
of damp laundry, in the dryer, Id slip
a hand in, under her neck,
slide the other under her back,
and evenly lift her up. Her little bottom
sat in my palm, her chest contained
the puckered, moire sacs, and her neck -
I was afraid of her neck, once I almost
thought I heard it quietly snap,
I looked at her and she swivelled her slate
eyes and looked at me. It was in
my care, the creature of her spine, like the first
chordate, as if the history
of the vertebrate had been placed in my hands.
Every time I checked, she was still
with us - someday, there would be a human
race. I could not see it in her eyes,
but when I fed her, gathered her
like a loose bouquet to my side and offered
the breast, greyish-white, and struck with
minuscule scars like creeks in sunlight, I
felt she was serious, I believed she was willing to stay.

I first came across it in the poetry compilation "All the Poems you need to Say Hello" edited by Kate Clanchy. It's a wonderful gift for a new mum, and covers the various stages of becoming a mother - conception / pregnancy / loss / childbirth / first days / early years. I was given it 18 years ago and the bookmark inside is the scrap of paper we used to write down the times of my contractions. It's precious.

Morning Song
BY SYLVIA PLATH

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Oooft, never come across Girls Are Coming Out Of The Woods before - that's amazing. Stealing for my IB lit class.

It is isnt it hecates

That's beautiful Rufus

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods - brilliant. Hadn't come across it before, though I did read her novel Fountainville, which is about the surrogacy industry.

Am pretty sure she's gender-critical too.

One of my favourites...it was the reading at one of my childrens naming ceremony

BEATTIE IS THREE
At the top of the stairs
I ask for her hand. O.K.
She gives it to me.
How her fist fits my palm,
A bunch of consolation.
We take our time
Down the steep carpetway
As I wish silently
That the stairs were endless

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

That's fantastic.

Emily Dickinson

She rose to His Requirement—dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife—

If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe—
Or first Prospective—Or the Gold

In using, wear away,

It lay unmentioned—as the Sea
Develop Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself—be known
The Fathoms they abide—

Anne Sexton is an extraordinary and controversial mid 20th century writer. She wrote visceral poems about the reality of womanhood, relationships, and her mental health (which she struggled with throughout). She took her own life - I often think of the powerful opening line from her poem Live - "Live or die, but don't poison everything". This is an example of the sort of themes she tackles...

#TriggerWarningAbortion

The Abortion - Anne Sexton

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.