Every few weeks I see there is an empty chair in our local nursery,
Because my son, still unconceived, flushes away as blood around
the twentieth of the month,
Though he resists, painfully, puts up a fight, wills to be born,
Weeps blood and whispers: mummy, I would be good, I really would.
Why? Tell me why you don’t want to have me.
I sing him a song about other little children:
They didn’t cry, not even in Treblinka.
I huddle like a foetus to stop him struggling,
Hug the hot water bottle to let him get warm.
Stop it, I say, stop fooling around. Just stay put
And be glad you’ve got to sit it out another month.
You’d scream in terror if you saw what it’s like out here.
And he says: I’d rather make up my own mind, if it’s all the same.
I read him a poem about the girl in Guernica,
How her eyes can’t see what her hands are doing.
And he says: is that worse than me rotting from your pills,
My cells disintegrating, falling as bloody dew on your pads,
Knowing every month you don’t love me at all?
You won’t buy me a little vest or red thread for my hair,
You’ll never see my face or ask about my grades.
Please, just love me, mummy, let me out of my cell!
And I tell him about my own mummy,
How she had a hysterectomy and cried under anesthetic.
Then I tell him: OK, you’ve won, I’ll think about what we’ve got to do.
I don’t love you, but I’ll try to be a better person,
More feeling and not so scared of you.
Just don’t go, don’t leave me, d’you hear?
And he says: OK, let’s call it quits, there’s hardly any of me left anyway,
Some last drops, a blackened clot of heart, and red threads.
We’ll talk again, mummy, he says, I’ll be back again to be unbirthed,
To flush away in blood, to weep, to beg, to struggle,
To swear I would be good, really I would,
To weep, to plead with you to get me out.
Somewhere around the twentieth I’ll be back to visit you.
Translated by the author, revised by Robert Reid