Written piece
Hanging on by a thread
Melissa Farrier Gomez
Trinidad and Tobago
About this piece
The poem "Hanging on by a thread" explores the strong bond that a mother shares with her baby through breastfeeding. It takes you through the thread of physical, psychological and emotional pain that a mother endures when maternity leave ends and she has to return to work.
Just three months old,
still so new,
still so green,
fresh from the womb.
Still clinging to my breath and heartbeat,
Like they belong to him.
Is like we sewn together,
My blood, threaded into his.
Yet they say is time.
Time to cut the cord proper,
like a piper
thiefing mango off the tree
before it have time to ripe.
Maternity leave done now,
And every step toward the office,
further from my baby,
My skin raw from the separation,
like cloth, stretching and ripping.
Each second of the day, feeling like enslavement
to hands that draft rules
but never nurse a child yet.
This nine-to-five cage,
Like top spinning in mud,
Begging the Red House,
where it kept, for the keys.
Only a woman,
a mother
can name this pain.
Rip away from the breast,
he latch on to since he born.
Snatched from familiar arms
and dropped into stranger hands
In daycare,
but they could ever care, like me?
Time moving slow-slow,
Breasts hanging heavy and hard,
Like a breadfruit before roasting.
I stand in a four-by-four storage room,
Door lock,
back against shelves of boxes and files,
hiding the wet stain
spreading across my blouse.
Pumping through my lunch hour.
The nurse voice still echoing:
“Breastfed is best fed.”
Posters plastered on hospital walls,
A common thread in health centres too,
exalting the breast
as sacred,
superior.
But this is how we treat
the holy grail?
No throne to sit.
No fridge to store
the liquid gold.
No protected time.
No grace.
No understanding
that we cannot schedule
milk flow in between
meetings and emails.
They tell us,
Give our bodies,
Give our breast,
Nurture is we nature.
But it impossible
To thread this needle,
When the eye so small.