Erika Saunders on "Minnehaha Falls the Day After Dobbs"

Growing up in the Roe v. Wade era afforded me choices I assumed would always be available. The choices available to me as a young woman now seem to be different than what my teenage daughters have before them regarding health, career, and family.

Our family vacationed in Minnesota the week the Dobbs v. Jackson decision was announced. Even with an extended audience of our extended family to discuss the ramifications with, it wasn’t enough to think through and process how this would impact my family, my country.

On that trip when we visited the Minnehaha Falls, my brother-in-law pulled up on his phone “The Song of Hiawatha” by Longfellow and read some lines as we walked. I consider poems to be a vast quilted together conversation and enjoy writing in response to another poem. So, while we visited the falls, I was observant and curious what my experience would yield.

Poems typically begin for me in an experience. I journal details and then let the experience simmer. When I have time to begin drafting a poem, I skim my journal for events or topics and pull nuggets of words and phrases onto the page. Then begins the crafting. Friends have asked before for a checklist of the things I consider at this stage: possible forms, consideration of sentence structure, word choice, literary devices to employ, etc. It is the magic, I suppose, the sense of the poem forming.

Some of my favorite poems I’ve written are those that surprise me. When the language and meaning becomes something entirely different than what I expected when I typed in those first few words and phrases. I once wrote a poem for my husband on his birthday where I intended to celebrate our youthful enjoyment of video gaming, yet the poem shaped into a bleak view of computer zombie-like life in a doomed natural world. (I still gifted it to him.)

Occasionally you write a poem that pulls together seemingly desperate writing experiences that remind you why writing is a perpetual learning practice. Falling water, a staircase, decay. The first choice for this poem was the stanza structure, which I knew would reinforce these ideas by pulling the reader’s eye down as if stepping or falling.

breasts. Falls like a she-bear falls

into a pit trap camouflaged with deadfall

in the forest. Falls as in to commit sin,

Secondly, was to interrogate the definitions of words such as fall, roe, and wade. How are all the ways we can fall based on this court decision? Definitions of roe and wade were an intentional nod to the original ruling, and it was interesting how they fit with the themes.

The goal of this poem was to have each stanza fall into the next one not just by structure but by repetition. We are all falling together repeatedly.

It takes the longest time to work the end of a poem. Typically, I like to turn the poem in the last two to three stanzas and leave the reader with a final punch in the last line. This is tricky. It was important to end questioning the premise that, “abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Which brought me to consider my grandparents whose experiences bridged the pre and post Roe v. Wade periods. My grandfather once became very animated when our cousin had complications in a fourth pregnancy that were life threatening, and he questioned why she would continue to have children with such known risk. Being raised Catholic, and having a mother who suffered several miscarriages and ended up dying in a mental institution where it sounds like she was placed due to depression, might have made him particularly sensitive to the vulnerabilities of women when they had no reproductive rights.

We’ll just make do.

You might question the choice to give the direct quote in a poem about abortion rights to the husband. Thinking of my grandfather and the men in my life, it was important to bring them into the conversation. Any decision that impacts the health and wellbeing of one family member impacts all. From the stories my grandparents told of growing up in the Depression, the war years, and raising a family; the one consistent theme was that as long as we care for one another, we will find a way to make do.

In a workshop once, I walked the audience through a poem from showing them the first scribbled journal entry to the final published product and explained the thought process and decisions made along the way. At the end one audience member raised their hand and stated they honestly couldn’t see how I got from the start to the finish. I responded that the work to form a polished poem out of chicken scratch is a series of dozens of micro decisions on the part of the writer based on their experience of what works well for them. We have our strengths and as we lean on those our style emerges.

In “Minnehaha Falls the Day After Dobbs” the choice of structure, use of definitions and repetition, and interrogation of the consequences of falling were a few of those dozens of decisions that led to the work coming together.