Poem with No Children In It Instead, the poem is full of competent trees, sturdy and slow-growing. The trees live on a wide clean lawn full of adults. All night, the adults grow older without somersaulting or spinning. They grow old while thinking about themselves. They sleep well and stay out late, their nerves coiled neatly inside their grown bodies. They don’t think about children because children were never there to begin with. The children were not killed or stolen. This is absence, not loss. There is a world of difference: the distance between habitable worlds. It is the space that is unbearable. The poem is relieved not to have to live in it. Instead, its heart ticks perfectly unfretfully among the trees. The children who are not in the poem do not cast shadows or spells to make themselves appear. When they don’t walk through the poem, time does not bend around them. They are not black holes. There are already so many nots in this poem, it is already so negatively charged. The field around the poem is summoning children and shadows and singularities from a busy land full of breathing and mass. My non- children are pulling children away from their own warm worlds. They will arrive before I can stop them. When matter meets anti-matter, it annihilates into something new. Light. Sound. Waves and waves of something like water. The poem’s arms are so light they are falling upward from the body. Why are you crying? - Claire Wahmanholm (American poet)
This poem was published just yesterday, in the poem-a-day publication I receive via email. It affected me more than most.
The poet says she wrote the poem as a “thought experiment.” She asked, “Could I, just over the course of a poem, inhabit a parallel universe where I never had children?”
So why did this poem affect me? Because it struck me as the inverse of an exercise I’ve engaged in many times: can I inhabit a parallel universe where I did have children? I remember a very, very vivid dream I had, a week or two out of the ICU after my cancer surgery. I wrote about it here. The dream was brief but full of “back story” – within the dream. It was like living an entire, parallel life – a life in which in which I had children. I awoke heartbroken. This poem invoked in me a recollection of that dream and its psychological aftermath. I’d call it one of my “top ten” dreams of my entire life.
