Abortion Poem by Beryl Dov

You ripped my heart out with a wire hanger
in the middle of our second trimester but
I would not let go and dug my tiny fingers deep
into your uterus, clutching desperate to my promise.
There, I calcified like alabaster, layer upon layer,
like the gauze that swaddles the Pharaohs of the Nile.
You’ve carried me, your darkest secret, for fifty-one years,
never knowing the humanity I would bestow upon you,
the gift of my companionship to your infernal desolation,
my boundless daughterly love and, robbed of this bounty,
you were condemned to straggle the earth,
not as a mother, but as a coffin,
a walking coffin,
better off dead,
like me.