This week’s Dispatches from New Motherhood treat is the extraordinary WE THREW YOUR PLACENTA TO THE SEA by Aly Vernon. It’s a gorgeously lyrical and visceral poem, full of pin-sharp articulation and a pervasive sense of wonder.
Aly says, ‘I wrote the piece to reflect a sense of mourning for pregnancy that I sometimes felt; the time my baby was closest to me and the realities of motherhood lay ahead. After childbirth I also wanted to capture some of the utter awe I felt for the human body and what we’re capable of as women. Writing was so hugely cathartic for me throughout that first year and made me feel so connected to other women, around the world and throughout time.’
Enjoy Aly’s poem here.
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We Threw Your Placenta to the Sea
Aly Vernon
We threw your placenta to the sea.
Our placenta,
Ours shared.
The physical representation of our joined beings,
When you were me and there was no space between us,
When my blood flowed into you and yours into mine,
The air I breathed sustained you and the food I ate nourished you,
When I lived with two heartbeats inside of me.
And all through this bloody mass which we are now setting free.
I see now for the first time our umbilical cord,
Only at this point of letting go do I look at it,
Too gruesome before,
Too loudly sung the memories of its entrance to the world,
But now it holds both disgust and awesome wonder,
It is our lifeline,
A rope from me to you,
Cut when our journey of separation began,
When we became untangled as two.
When you stopped being a mystery and started to be you.
Our life together now sits in an old curry takeaway box,
Tucked amongst our picnic things,
It looks up at me; pink, viscous, gruesome and raw,
Taken from its home in the freezer next to the postpartum emergency ready meals,
Demoted from lifeline to a forgotten box under the frozen peas,
It has waited to be set free.
To give new life, to continue the cycle out at sea,
Free to float, to swim, to wander,
To crash against the rocks,
Until the time comes to be consumed by creatures of the deep.
Our life would feed other lives,
My nourishment to you, nourishing again.
It was by this very sea that you were made.
You and your lifeline,
Starting your journey of growth together to the resonance of the roaring waves,
You heard the gulls calling, the sea wishing and the longing for you in the air.
The sun shone that week you were conceived,
Crisp, blue November days that held the seeds of your existence.
By this water you came to me,
So to this water part of us shall return,
To the boisterous beast of creation.
And so we stand by that sea.
The two of us who have now become three.
You lie with your warm cheek against my chest,
Your shoulders rising and falling in innocent slumber,
Leaning on my heartbeat for comfort,
But breathing your own air, pumping your own blood this time.
No longer nested inside of me, curled so peacefully.
I silently throw our placenta up, up and out,
To the crashing waves and the almighty wind,
It submerges deeply into the water down by the rocks,
Disappears from view,
Our shared lifeline is gone.
I stand and mourn for the time we were closer,
The two of us entwined as one,
Then turn and walk away,
Holding you,
My perfectly completed being.
***
We Threw Your Placenta to the Sea by Aly Vernon appears in the Mothership Writers anthology Dispatches from New Motherhood. All 50 pieces from the book will be published here over the year to come, creating an online library of what it really means – right here, right now – to be a new mother.