A Poem: To The Birthing Women of Tim-Buck-Two

I sit with you   as you   LabourIn the ancient meaning of the work.You shift   and pant

The baby’s oceanic bath water   dripping

Moistening the air with the powerful

Beckonings of the sea

Smells of spring soil

Odors that trail through my brain

Invariably awakening vague primordial echoes of coming to life.

You kneel, and groan deeply with gravity’s pull. You squat. You pace.

Swaying your body, Swollen with child

The way a bush bows to the ground with it’s heavy burden of fragrant blooms.

I perch on the birthing stool you’ve restlessly abandoned

Near your kneeling   breathing   blowing   breathing   figure.

I feel my way along the midwifery tightrope.  Alert.

My heart full with sister compassion & helpfulness,

Learning that my greatest giftIs to step back at every possible appropriate moment

Making room for you,

Encouraging you,

To experience your own astounding strength in birth

Rather than my generous ability to meet a dependence.

I am mildly distracted by my own experience with you.

My bottom sags loose

My mouth forms an Oooooo

As a deep resonant exhale involuntarily

Vibrates

Downward

As I am rocked in the wake of these birthing currents.

I suddenly long to be with you in drama, if not in patience.

To squat low

Opening our pelvises to the earth

And then to howl with labour’s effort

To Roll & Rumble with the force.

To sing the babies home

With that deep bass sound

Of women opening their bodies to another being

Like the crashing of the midnight surf

Like the encores of Sweet Honey in the Rock

Like the Mammas of millenniums past. 

Dedicated to Jeannie Wylie-Kellerman, 1956-2005, the mama who opened her heart and birth to midwife a young apprentice into midwifery. Written 1989, Beth Bailey Barbeau