This poem, discovered tucked away in my phone notes and dated April 4th, 2023, captures a moment of reflection during my second pregnancy, just shy of my thirtieth birthday. Facing the anxieties of a turbulent world, I sought solace in the vastness of the universe, contemplating my place within the cosmos. It was a time of profound change, a Saturn Return, a period astrologically associated with growth, responsibility, and confronting life’s realities. This poem, while perhaps self-centered amidst global suffering, represents a personal dispatch, a small offering of my inner world.
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What is a Saturn Return?
A Saturn Return occurs approximately every 29.5 years, mirroring the duration of Saturn’s orbit around the sun. This celestial event signifies Saturn’s return to the same position it occupied at the time of your birth. Often described as an astrological coming-of-age, the Saturn Return is associated with themes of responsibility, time, and wisdom (via the cut). It’s a period of introspection, growth, and often significant life changes.
A Saturn Return Poem: Motherhood as Cosmic Transformation
the internet tells me it’s time, in a jaunty star-themed calculator. it tells me to expect
reality checks, restriction, mortality, and loss.
yes, my saturn return is motherhood. I knew it was cosmic, knew it was planetary.
I’m pregnant for the second time. time to get flung back around.
hear this song as a lullaby, a dirge, or a psalm, selah, shush away slowly
from the sleeping child and close the door so gently. what did I want?
for it to be easy? for all my seams to stay stitched up, to not come undone
when my world hurtled back toward a strange hot center?
every thing changed! there is no rest! I am alone!
these shouts shoot into a solar system that is mostly small rocks, bigger rocks, then planets.
so, this is my saturn return. and, honestly, it’s tidy.
here, take care of someone else now. here, be remade by forgetting
who you always have been. be only here, in this single dark room,
small body heaped in your arms, across your belly where a new baby grows.
my soul has been multiplied into three, a new trinity in the space of me.
how did we get here? only by giving blood and bones, and nearly every hour for years.
here, return to the same stars as your birth, as you give birth to your children
who obliterate you so sweetly that it becomes your little universe
to be in pieces and alone in the white noise hush.
spun back around to just where I started. have I made any progress?
I was an infant, now I carry an infant, and what between?
saturn is where I know it to be, where it sees me best, says “that one” about me,
with its luminous rings making an embrace that is a circle.
I have made my way around the primordial tower, showing my mother’s face in mine,
to this place where my own soul begs do not destroy and one more day
and very little else with any sort of language.
it’s hard to carry the weight, except the gentle lift of the notion
that I’m right where I am meant to be, located somehow in my own stars
underneath my own sky with my children and my acre of land and my wits about me,
underneath a startling galaxy of possibilities. the god who has forgotten me remembers.
the arms that carry me set me down safe on my own two feet again. you are doing this.Reflecting on the Saturn Poem
This saturn poem explores the transformative power of motherhood during a Saturn Return. The poem uses cosmic imagery – planets, stars, the universe – to juxtapose the vastness of existence with the intimate experience of carrying and caring for a child. It grapples with feelings of being overwhelmed, lost, and yet, profoundly connected to something larger than oneself. The cyclical nature of the Saturn Return is reflected in the poem’s imagery of being “spun back around” to the beginning, yet transformed by the journey.
The poem also acknowledges the challenges and sacrifices of motherhood – the “reality checks, restriction, mortality, and loss” – and the feeling of being “remade” by the experience. Ultimately, however, it finds solace and grounding in the love for her children and the belief that she is exactly where she is meant to be.