First doll, I rocked her blue-eyed blink in my lap - eyelashes blunt as toothbrushes, pink pout of mouth. "Name her," Mother and her friend commanded. I fanned through two and a half years of words to find the one to blazon my knowledge of Eve's apple core of motherhood, to find the best word my mother'd taught me. "Dirty," I announced. The two recoiled, cajoled, and pled a change. Despairing, they suggested some babies had two names; but I'd been given one and so I gave. On trains, in butcher shops, in hotel lobbies, looking up at benign, pink, stooping powder-scented faces and their queries, anticipating her embarrassed smile and their recoil, I proclaimed, "Dirty." | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A CRADLE SONG by PADRAIC COLUM PUTTIN' THE BABY AWAY by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD: SONG by OLIVER GOLDSMITH INSTEAD OF TEARS by JOSEPH AUSLANDER GROWTH by MILDRED TELFORD BARNWELL |