What keeps me coming back and reading your poetry is the emotion you put into each piece. I really admire how you always manage to prye open a piece of my heart with your words. So when I started reading this poem I knew it would have an effect on me just like all your others but to be honest this poem did more to my heart than what your other poems have done. I was stunned by reading this. It really hurt more than usual to read this one.

I also read the message you left on the comments page and I think you are very brave to not only write something so personal and share it with us but I also think you are an amazing person to experiance a situation so heartbreaking yet your still here. Still living. Not giving in to the pain. I know it must be very hard but there is an air of strength that comes off all your poems no matter how sad.

I hope you manage to focus on what do you have rather than what you don't and I hope your life is forfilled in other ways. Children are a precious gift and it must be heartbreaking not being able to have your own but that said there are other ritches in life and even though they may not fill the void of having your own child they still make life worth living and as hard as it gets I am sure your life is worth living.

An excellent poem

5/5

Wow... bit lost for words actually.

Your title drew me in and I kind of sensed from the title it was maybe about a loss or the feeling of missing someone but I had no idea of what was in store. I was shocked.

I love the way you opened it with the time which they have been gone and then with that question " but who is counting" just reaches into your heart because you get the impact this has had on thier life.

I'll never be
able to feel the warmth
of a baby growing inside
of me, or the cravings
she may give.

- I can totally relate to this and I can feel and understand that pain. No one can ever change that feeling or the facts of it. This is when it hit me it was about the loss of an unborn child which is a devastating and soul destroying thing to go through. It also makes you aware that the writer is thinking of all the " what might have been's "

Oh how I dream for a she

- I thought this line stood out very well, I liked how you kept it seperated. It stood out to me because in reality in the very early stages of pregnancy we don't know what the sex of the baby is and yet somehow we can have a sense of it being one or the other, or a dream of which it is.

I'll never be able to
feel her feet patting
inside my womb, and
she'll never be able to
hear me sing her
sweet lullabies

- Again, such a great sense of loss in this stanxa for the things that cannot be. But you have expressed so well the yearning that there will always be for this baby.

I think your ending was fantastic and just topped it off for me, the way you repeat the starting verse is just amazing and works so well.

I do however have one suggestion. I was curious when I read the numbers in the ending and they were the same as the first verse... I wonder if it would be more powerful to change the seconds in the second one to show that even as you pour your heart out into this poem, you have still been counting the seconds without your baby.

This I think would be giving it the ultimate power and ending, and also emphasising your question " who is counting"

I really enjoyed this poem, I think it was very well structured and it did touch me in very raw places and I connected with it.

Thank you for sharing this heart wrenching piece. I think all the mothers out there would shed tears from reading this.

5/5