Forward to the poem:

After the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban went down, I dug up a fragment of a short story I had begun over a year ago.  It dealt with the reflections of an older woman who remembers the time before Roe v. Wade and the back alley butchers who were too often the only recourse for a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.  In my time I had nursed a couple of friends through the aftermath of these barbaric procedures.  Luckily none of them died.  I have often wondered where so many of these women who had experienced the bad old days were now and why so few of them have had the courage to speak up against the current madness.

Your name is Florence Swift
You are sixty-eight years old today
You and your husband have just visited the grandchildren
For the second time this year

You no longer remember
That distant gray October afternoon
When you stumbled into to the waiting cab
For the long ride back to Skokie
Your dress and coat stained
You left blood on the seat
Hoping the cabbie would not notice
He knew

Now you ride through Christmas streets
And watch the young girls
With their cell phones rushing to parties
A sadness you cannot understand
Tugs at you like something not fully swallowed
Stuck in the limbo of the not quite conscious.

Was it Dante who claimed that aborted babes went to limbo?
Your church no longer admits that
That place exists anymore
Its map will likely rest in cold storage
In the Vatican basement
Along with the statue of St. Christopher [2.]
And the old terracentric planetariums.

In the city of Florence on yours and John’s honeymoon in 1963
You visited the celebrated poet’s house
Pausing to gaze for a moment
On that famous bust near the entrance
Your eyes questioned his
As if to ask “Did you make it all up?”
The poet’s deep spheres, remained set in their reverie.
 The tour guide and John’s impatient look
Got the Florentine expatriate [3.] off the hook
With an exhortation to
“Move along”
Dante might have said the same to you
Florence in Florence
“Move along. Move on”

“Is this digression going somewhere?”
You ask yourself as the bright season’s lights
Blur in the windshield
Moist with melting snowflakes

At the stoplight a young girl hurries past
That look
Familiar
Darker than the others’ distracted holiday angst
Familiar

Then it comes finally into consciousness:
Yes
That reality is coming back again.

Notes:

[1.]  The word Agonistes, found as an epithet following a person's name, means 'the struggler' or 'the combatant'. It is most often an allusion to John Milton's 1671 verse tragedy "Samson Agonistes," which recounts the end of Samson's life, when he is a blind captive of the Philistines (famous line: "Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves"). The struggle that "Samson Agonistes" centers upon is the effort of Samson to renew his faith in God's support.

[2.] Despite his removal of his name and feast day (July 25th) from the calendar of saints in 1969, devotion to Saint Christopher remains popular among Roman Catholics.

[3.] Dante Alighieri was exiled from his beloved Florence. He was condemned to be a perpetual expatriate.  If he returned to Florence he could be burned at the stake. Dante still hoped late in life that he might be invited back to Florence on honorable terms. For him, exile was nearly a form of death, stripping him of much of his identity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante#Exile_and_death

Robert Boldt an editor of MWC News, is a freelance film/video producer living in Jefferson City, Missouri. He is active in local politics, worked on the Howard Dean and John Kerry campaigns and is a cofounder of The White Rose Collective. Articles by Bob Boldt at MWC News http://mwcnews.net/bob-boldt

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