Permission to Grieve: A Poet Addresses the Unmapped Territory of Pregnancy Loss
You were so new, still more dream than person.
A poetry submission hits a personal chord.
photo by Susanne Nilsson/flickr
As the column coordinator for AJN’s Art of Nursing, which publishes poetry, flash fiction, and visual art related to health and health care, many poems cross my desk. I always appreciate the creativity and emotion in these poems, even when they aren’t quite a fit for our journal. And then there are the ones that not only fit, but that strike a personal chord and stay with me.
“Carrying,” by Katie Manning, PhD, MA, is one such poem. (Click on the PDF for the best version.) It immediately touched me because of the powerful way it described a sensitive topic: pregnancy loss. As a mother who lost a pregnancy in my second trimester, I found myself nodding with tears in my eyes at her elegant descriptions of grief and loss.
The poem received universal praise from our peer reviewers, and when I wrote to Manning to tell her we’d accepted it, I added a personal note about my own experience (something I had never done as an editor). We exchanged words of comfort and spoke about how the topic is not nearly discussed […]