Paved Paradise



As I, at twenty, watched my body for warning signs
of a new existence, I thought of Joni — who,
at twenty-one, lay in a Canadian hospital
where crooked caretakers bound
the breasts of unwed mothers
to suppress their milk supply. With   
shaking hands, she let go of Little Green,
and signed a paper promising her a childhood
of private schools and country clubs – inconceivable
to someone simply surviving. Soon
came the success; the cash, the chemical
happiness, the crowds clamoring
to get close to her – but still,

sometimes, sitting in stage wings,
she imagined she could hear
the breaking and the breathing of
a memory game card daughter, somberly
searching for her match
as the radio carried a voice from
a famous California canyon  – a maternity ward
for a generation’s greatest hits. I wonder

how the landscape would have looked
had she chosen instead to be a
prisoner of the white lines on the
road to ballet practice; when
she told the coyote she had no regrets,
did she remember the motion sickness
of feeling the world turn
on a silent birthday? Never mind;

after her, there were millions of women,
each with an empty space to fill in, where
the music napped peacefully, during
their confusion years – before
they bore their own girls,
whose futures and freedoms now lie

in the hands of men
old enough to remember when
she sang about looking at life

from both sides now.

About this poem

This is an original poem that I wrote after hearing about the Supreme Court's recent draft opinion concerning Roe vs. Wade. Being the music nerd that I am, I immediately thought of Joni Mitchell -- who, in 1965, gave birth to a daughter that she put up for adoption mainly because she did not have the financial means to be a mother at the time. The poem is not "pro" or "anti" anything, but rather, takes a look at the issue of pregnancy and motherhood from the standpoint of adoption -- which is often proposed as an easy solution to a complex problem -- and asks the reader to consider the spectrum of feelings that parents and children can have about adoption, and why it's not so simple as many people think it is. The poem also includes bits and pieces of Mitchell's lyrics, to show the conflict between three lives; her stardom as a world-famous musician, her inner world as a biological mother grieving the child she could not raise, and her hypothetical motherhood. 

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Written on May 24, 2022

Submitted by szeroonian on May 24, 2022

Modified on March 20, 2023

1:19 min read
60

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXAXXXXXAXABX XXXXXXXX XCCDXXXX XXBXXX DDX X
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,407
Words 265
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 13, 8, 8, 6, 3, 1

Sharisse Zeroonian

Sharisse Zeroonian is a writer, filmmaker, and teacher currently residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Boston University in 2018 with a B.S. in Film/Television, and is now pursuing an MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen at Lesley University. Her fiction and poetry has been featured in The Armenian Weekly, NPR, and other platforms, and she has written/directed five marginally watchable films/TV projects. more…

All Sharisse Zeroonian poems | Sharisse Zeroonian Books

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