I wrote "New Bird" shortly after my daughter, Sunrise, was stillborn at 40 weeks… All the literature I read concerning grief used language such as "taken too soon" and "passed on" to describe the experience of death. I had a hard time reconciling these passive terms with my belief that my daughter had chosen her moment to leave the world. Even though I never got a chance to watch her grow, I felt I knew her: a girl who knew her own mind, a girl who took control of her destiny, unafraid. My grief has changed over the past three years: sometimes sharp, sometimes blunt, always transforming into something I don't expect. My relationship with Sunrise (I say relationship because, even though she's not here, we are still bonded in that mother/daughter way) has changed too. For so long after her death I thought of her as "somewhere else," apart from me, unreachable, but now I know she is here with me, always my daughter, my muse. N...
Women's Spiritual Poetry