This is for any of you who have ever lost a baby.  I remember my own miscarriage and the years of stiffled pain I held inside. I want to share with you a beautiful poem by Paula Brancato.

 

The only time I ever cried at the gym,

apart from when I broke a balance beam with my

head, was in yoga class.  The teacher,

in her bow pose, switched on “Love

to love you, baby.”   Right into the second

chakra it went, just above my pubic bone, when something

very much like my head, but lower, burst.

 

Only a month before, I had lost a baby I wanted

and a man I didn’t, one after the other.

 

In my bow pose, holding my ankles,

pelvis rocking on the mat, I started to cry.

 

I had no idea my body had baby memory.

A current ran through me, very like when my head

unexpectedly hit the beam and I found I was still

alive, or when years later, I held my mother as my grandmother

died, feeling through her body, my grandmother’s life in me.

In the yoga class, what I felt was distinctly the other

way around, a life that almost was but now would never be.

A part of me had died, and a smaller part of my mother

and an even smaller part of my mother’s mother and so on.

 

Paula Brancato