Sarah Cross
Lily born from a storm.
The red tides of her mother
raging over the O.R. table,
flooding the floor.
The blood bank emptied.
Aorta compressed
against mast of spine.
The afterbirth would not come
after, would not come
from where it had lodged itself
for months into the iliacs.
No matter what we did
there was not enough:
volume, oxygen, pressure, potassium.
Lily, a pearl cut loose
from its shell,
pale, blooming, consolation
from the frenzy.
From the operating room,
its metallic smell of death
we delivered her
into her father’s arms.
—
Sarah Cross is a poet, physician, and mother to three young children. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, she now lives on the shoreline of Connecticut. She believes there is a powerful and important role for the arts in the process of healing. Her poems grapple with mortality, death, love, and uncertainty. She has won several awards for her poetry including the Annual William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition, the Legible Script Creative Arts Contest, and honorable mention in the New Physician’s Creative Arts Contest. Her poems have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies. As a member of The Journal of Medical Humanities editorial board, she edits themed poetry collections. She is a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and teaches an elective on poetry in medicine to health-professional students.