Anne Stevenson - BGSS_Poem to My Daughter lyrics

'I think I'm going to have it,' I said, joking between pains. The midwife rolled competent sleeves over corpulent milky arms. 'Dear, you never have it, we deliver it.' A judgement the years proved true. Certainly I've never had you as you still have me, Caroline. Why does a mother need a daughter? Heart's needle, hostage to fortune, freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect than that bleating, razor-shaped cry that delivers a mother to her baby. The bloodcord snaps that held their sphere together. The child, tiny and alone, creates the mother. A woman's life is her own until it is taken away by a first, particular cry. Then she is not alone but a part of the premises of everything there is: a time, a tribe, a war. When we belong to the world we become what we are.