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...SOULS LAKE by ROBERT STUART FITZGERALD NOONTIDE REST by ANTIPHILUS OF BYZANTIUM THE FIRST SNOW by J. B. BENTON GHELUVELT; EPITAPH ON THE WORCESTERS by ROBERT SEYMOUR BRIDGES THE TOAD-EATER by ROBERT BURNS BALLAD OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON A BOOK OF AIRS: SONG 32 by THOMAS CAMPION A MARRIED WOMAN by THOMAS CAREW TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. A SCENE IN LONDON by EDWARD CARPENTER |