The Weaning Day is a week from today, so get ready for a barrage of breast feeding related posts. Today? A poem.
Published in S E G U L L A H, an LDS Publication (don’t ask why I am reading LDS poetry, I am still most Methodist — but man, those Mormons can WRITE.)
Milk and Blood
by Sharlee Mullins Glenn
I dreamed of Oxford . . .
(spires, a thousand spires, endless lectures, musty halls a solitary self in a Bodleian expanse. A good life my dear Wormwood. An orderly life.)
then awakened to laundry
and things to be wiped
(countertops, noses, bottoms)
How did this happen? And when, exactly?
Time flows, it flows, it flows
and there are choices to be made:
left or right?
paper or plastic?
blood or milk?
There’s freedom in the bleeding;
bondage in the milk—do not be deceived.
Ah, but it’s an empty freedom; a holy bondage,
A sweet and holy bondage.
Five times I chose the chains, those tender chains,
(though once will bind you just as well!)
and checked the crimson flow.
Suckled while dreaming of Trinity Term
but awakened, always awakened, to the laundry
and to that small and cherished captor at my breast.