The coolest experience as a reader is when the images on the page come alive, leaving an indelible mark on your mind. You are forever changed. The feeling is intensified when it relates to something that you have personally experienced. It is as if the writer has looked deep into your soul and truly gets you.  But the beauty of the written word is that the writer has the power to take the reader to places she has never been and leave her breathless from the experience.

That’s exactly what happened to me when I read “Carousel” by Anjali Enjeti in Minerva Rising’s Issue 4 – Mothers.  The words caught in my throat as I read:

As animals rise and fall, 

they release 

fleeting

black and white Images,

seen on dark, sterile screens,

of children never born.

I felt the loss. And though it’s been months since we selected this poem, I still see the “rise and fall” of “black and images, seen on dark, sterile screens.”

I recently asked Anjali about her inspiration for this poem and specifically black and white images as animals on a carousel.  Anjali shared the following with me:

I have had multiple miscarriages. The most devastating loss happened at the beginning of the second trimester, after I had already seen the baby’s heartbeat twice. About a year after I lost that baby, a boy, I took my other two daughters, then ages 6 and 3 on a carousel ride. After I hoisted the girls up onto animals and we started circling around, I noticed a family behind us — one of the only other families on the ride. The family had a mother, two girls about my daughters’ ages, and an infant, a son who would have been about the same age as my son would have been, had he lived.

When I turned away, I noticed the empty, childless animals and thought about the pregnancies I lost, and the black and white ultrasound images that were the only evidence that remained of their existence. I tried to picture those images as grown children, riding their own animals, clutching the reigns and giggling. The carousel ride, in a deep, visceral way, conjured in me the joy and the heartache inherent in the circle of life. 

How beautiful is that!  It’s just one example of the power found in women’s stories and poems.

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Read  “Carousal” and other powerful stories poems  in  Issue 4 – Mothers.  Watch for our e-book coming out next week.