(cw: pregnancy loss, miscarriage)
Picture Perfect
Blue against green,
Can I share this picture with you?
Green against blue,
The sky, the trees, and you.
I think of you often
While I swing your sister
In this lovely playground
With its backdrop of blue and green.
How would you have been?
Would you have been
The peace making sibling?
Or the rabble-rousing one?
This green against blue
Soothes, calms and embalms.
So I can store my thoughts
Of you to sift through
Another day, another time.
For now, I swing and swing
This little sister of yours.
Against the blue and the green.
Do you get to play
In that somewhere beyond?
Or are you harping and yodeling
In some corner of heaven?
Would I know you
If we met in the lanes
Of the other world?
Would it be instantaneous -
Our eyes meet -
And we know each other?
Or would we pass by
Distant strangers?
This green against blue
Works strangely on me.
There is just no child.
The swing is empty.
I swing an empty swing
On this dusty playground.
There are green trees,
A blue sky, but no you.
Ermelinda Makkimane
Ermelinda Makkimane loves thinking poetry and sometimes she writes down those words. Her work has appeared in Lucky Jefferson's 365 Collection, Pleaseseeme.com, RHiMe and Madras Courier and in the 2020 Summer Anthology by the Other Worldly Women Press. She currently works from her island-village in Goa, India. She has recently published her debut book "Her Story" - a womanist poem on Mary of Nazareth. It is available here: http://mybook.to/HerStoryMary
About This Poem
It came to me while swinging my little girl that there were other babies who never made it beyond a month or two of conception. So in a way this poem is about my own miscarriages and, considering the larger picture, the issue of infertility.