the poet is in labor…
it has hurt so much that pain and struggle seem, just now, the only reality.
but at the very moment when she feels she will die, or that she is already in hell,
she hears the midwife saying, “those are the shoulders you are feeling now”
–and she knows the head is out then, and the child is pushing and sliding out of her,
insistent, a poem.
from “The Poet in the World”
[…] line is probably nothing special in the scheme of things. Levertov knows how to make a line that is like polished glass, how to make a new meaning ring between the […]