The Advocate*
The Advocate There are things, mostly blood- related, we never tell the men. Some things can’t be fit to words unless people have sailed the same ocean, done the same butchery, hunted the over-sized beast with the same mix of lust and dread. Waiting in the kitchen for a phone call about the birth of a first grandchild, women pass the time with labor stories, the ones never told after Thanksgiving dinner when old battleship or gridiron or board- room warriors spin the hero cycles their families know by heart. Yet, each of us has her story, lost babies, murdered possibilities, miraculous births. None of us screamed in labor the way women do in movies, though each of us passed through a kind of death before the child presented. None of us was thanked for giving birth. As in the movies, it was the doctor who was pounded on the back. I can almost see some of you roll your eyes, shift in your seats, as these oldest, loneliest, most important acts of heroism pass unmarked. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! But, in the kitchen, the women of all ages and experience know the mother waiting by the phone for the daughter giving birth in another city. We know the repetition of birth forward and backward in time, the bloody heroics. We know almost everything worth knowing, for the womb is our Yale College and our Harvard. Sherry Robbins, Or, the Whale, BlazeVOX [books] *I wrote this poem years ago for a friend. Today. I’m the one waiting by the phone.
Sherry Robbins 
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