16 pages • 32 minutes read
Lucille CliftonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem uses imagery of bodies of moving water, like rivers or the sea, to craft an extended metaphor for the speaker’s aborted pregnancy in the context of the flow of time, memories, and life. Rough water acts throughout the poem as an aggressive force, pulling her imagined child far away from her and out to sea—and then later pulling the child back in, crashing like a wave of painful memories. This push-and-pull dynamic of regret and resolve, grief and relief, right and wrong, demonstrates the deep complexity of the speaker’s dilemma. The poem makes no attempt to hide the upsetting reality, but also does not waver in its resolve. Instead, the speaker makes a pledge, an oath of strength and hope going forward. It is a promise of growth and transformation: The speaker intends to do better and be a better person for the sake of the child she couldn’t support.
The first stanza explores the relationship between memories and the flow of moving water. The speaker describes the abortion with the word “dropped” (Line 1), a word that avoids dramatic emotions or visceral imagery. To drop something could be simple, an accident, or due to the lack of a firm grip. However, the word also implies that something is being discarded, dropped in the trash—and for the speaker, it does feel as though the abortion was like flushing something down the drain. The speaker continues this metaphor of running water, the dreams and hopes for the child washing away, joining the refuse and sewage in the pipes of the city, “down to meet the waters under the city / and run one with the sewage to the sea” (Lines 2-3). The reader can logically assume that the child’s “almost body” (Line 1) does eventually make it out to sea, implying that there is a better and final resting place.
The flow of the city pipes out into sea creates a powerful current, and like the tides ebb, so do the speaker’s painful memories: “waters rushing back” (Line 4). These are her regrets, traumas, and immense grief over the circumstances that forced her to make this difficult decision. This overwhelming tidal wave of emotion reminds her of how she feels she drowned her future child by flushing it down the drain—and these emotions make her feel as if she herself is drowning. She asks, “what did i know about waters rushing back / what did i know about drowning” (Lines 4-5) suggesting her youth or inexperience at the time of the abortion. She could not have known or predicted its lasting effects.
In the second stanza, she reflects on that time in her life, evaluating her situation to both justify and reconcile herself to the abortion. Winter in this stanza symbolizes hardship, specifically poverty. The speaker clarifies that she was in a difficult position, and the idea of frigid cold underscores this suffering. She could not afford heating, and calls this period “the year of the disconnected gas” (Line 8). In addition, she also had no access to reliable transportation—complicating getting to work. Such poverty precludes adequate childcare. These are the kinds of obstacles many women face with an unexpected pregnancy. The speaker grapples with these realities, addressing them honestly and standing firm in her resolve.
She claims that if she had maintained the pregnancy, she would have had to give up the child regardless, making “the thin / walk over genesee hill into the canada wind” (Lines 9-10). Once again, winter sets the scene for this image. “canada wind” is an allusion to freezing temperatures, and the speaker imagines she would have braved these biting conditions just to “watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands” (Line 11). Essentially, the speaker laments the idea of giving her child to a stranger—whether that be through adoption, foster care, or abandonment. The speaker compares the imaginary child to snow in the winter: “you would have fallen naked as snow into winter” (Line 12). Snow is ephemeral, and like other forms of water, it eventually pours back into the sea. This line demonstrates the speaker’s attitude toward the circle of life; she believes that one way or another, this pregnancy would have condemned her child to certain suffering and death, the “almost body” (Line 1) melting into the sea. This fatalism does not minimize the memory’s sting or the speaker’s grief. With a deep longing, she imagines sharing these stories with that child. The loss of that connection still haunts her.
In the third and final stanza, the speaker makes promises to her lost child, swearing to be a good mother and a pillar of strength to her other living children—or else let terrible things befall her. Once again, the speaker uses water as a metaphor for suffering, as well as cleansing and salvation. She vows to let grief and pain “pour over my head” (Line 17) and to “let the sea take me for a spiller / of seas” (Lines 18-19). Drawing on the metaphor from the first stanza, her “lost baby” was like an ocean of possibility that she flushed out to sea. In doing so, she spilled an entire ocean, or the future of the child she could not have. She bids terrible things happen to her if she cannot be strong for her other children, even to the point of estrangement from her people. She says, “let black men call me stranger” (Line 19), putting her sense of community on the line “for your never named sake” (Line 20). While the child never came to be, the speaker tries to give purpose to this loss by bettering herself in honor of what could have been.
By Lucille Clifton