Can anyone tell me the meaning of Night Pieces: For A Child by Adrienne Rich?

Question

1. The Crib
You sleep I bend to cover
Your eyelids work. See
your dream, cloudy as a negative
swimming underneath.
You blurt a cry. Your eyes
spring open, still filmed in dream.
Wider. They fix me—
--death’s head, sphinx, medusa?
You scream.
Tears lick my cheeks, my knees
droop at your fear.
Mother I no more am,
but woman, and nightmare.

2. Her Waking

Tonight I jerk astart in a dark
hourless as Hiroshima
almost hearing you breathe
in a cot three doors away.

You still breath, yes—
and my dream with its gift of knives,
its murderous hider and seeker,
ebbs away, recoils.

back into the egg of dreams,
the vanishing of point mind.
All gone


But you and I---
Swaddled in a dumb dark
If I could hear you now
old as sickheartness
modern as pure annihilation—

we drift in ignorance.
If I could hear you now
Mutter some gentle animal sound!
If milk flowed from my breast again...

Answer 1

It sounds as if a mother is wanting her child to be an infant again so she can take care of her and feel needed maybe she is experiencing empty nest.

Sign in to vote!