A Poem From Rita Dove

[mariann]

So I was reading Ralph Keyes's book, The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, and there's a section in chapter three about using life as subject for writing and how Rita Dove used her own life as a woman, a mother, and a wife to write her poetry.

There's a poem I've never heard or read before and it struck me as appropriate for this community because the poem itself is about womanly parts and the commonality we all share as women, regardless of color... that is, menstruation. I've not read much of Rita Dove's work, but when I read this particular poem, I had to stop and think and smile. What an awesome, open gift to her child and to women!

My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling. She demands
to see mine and momentarily
we're a lopsided star
among the spilled toys,
my prodigious scallops
exposed to her neat cameo.

And yet the same glazed
tunnel, layered sequences.
She is three; that makes this
innocent. We're pink!
she shrieks, and bounds off.

Every month she wants
to know where it hurts
and what the wrinkled string means
between my legs. This is good blood
I say, but that's wrong, too.
How to tell her that it's what makes us --
black mother, cream child.
That we're in the pink
and the pink's in us.