The long swim: a response to miscarriage

Kirstie McKinnon

Miscarriage can be a difficult experience. It feels delicate for me still, although it has been several years since my last miscarriage. There is a silence that accompanies this kind of loss, a lack of conversation, a lack of acknowledgement, a problem of knowing how to say how it is, and to whom. Dolphins and whales tell their grief through action and their way of speaking has provided me – after a long time – with a way to find some human language to express my own ‘long swim’.

Whale mother
The whale mother
if her calf dies
will carry the body
on her back until
it breaks to fragments

I know the full scale
of this process
the long swim
of mourning
a body carried on
the back of my mind
over and over and over

until memory is scattered
to marram tips
to stars, to gull wings
until my hand steadies
on ocean rock.

Kirstie McKinnon lives, writes and surfs in East Coast Otago, New Zealand. She is inspired by the sea and its creatures, nature, conversation, art and humanity.