Amusing, and lovingly told in the first person, the poem describes the comically embarrassing physicality of giving birth and considers the profound implications of this life event: the sex act from which conception originates, the anguish of losing a child; the fearful joy of welcoming a new life into the world. During labor, the mother is also aware that the doctors expect her to perform, "the audience grows restive," but in the end they are of no consequence as it is "just me, quite barefoot / greeting my barefoot child."
Notes from the Delivery Room is a short poem that presents a series of metaphors commonly used to describe childbirth. It is a crisis, like the woman in a comic book tied to the railroad tracks; hard labor with physician as foreman; a harvest, like pulling potatoes from the earth; a magical event, like pulling a rabbit from a hat.
Throughout the poem, the reader feels the tension between these images, and the reality of bright lights, restraints, pain, and medical staff as they impinge upon an intensely personal experience. Finally the speaker abandons her metaphorical language and becomes simply herself, greeting her barefoot child. She and her child are finally human beings unencumbered by symbolism, not representing anything but themselves.
The poem depicts the vulnerability a woman may feel during this procedure, one that feels anything but routine. Even though the mammogram turns out predictably normal, the patient knows that she is changed. She has seen the fragile faults deep in her body, and she knows that no one, not even her doctor with his reassuring diagnosis, can "give innocence back."
A succinct poem [29 lines] that captures the essence of the position in which one finds oneself after a parent, or both parents, have died. Full of evocative phrases, this poem is less about grief than it is about awareness of adult responsibility and one's own future demise: "there is nobody / left standing between you / and the world . . . ."
In Linda Pastan's poem from her latest collection of the same name, the narrator proposes to prepare for the parting that comes with death while "in the fallacy of perfect health . . . ." Now, while there is time, dear ones could behave toward each other with all the loving tenderness befitting a preparation for permanent loss. Then the "ragged things that are coming next . . . would be like postscripts . . . Nothing could touch us."
