“How can you dare?”

Kevin Durkin posted this Anne Stevenson poem on Facebook the other day, and I was startled by the mixed reaction to it.

The Victory

I thought you were my victory
though you cut me like a knife
when I brought you out of my body
into your life.

Tiny antagonist, gory,
blue as a bruise. The stains
of your cloud of glory
bled from my veins.

How can you dare, blind thing,
blank insect eyes?
You barb the air. You sting
with bladed cries.

Snail. Scary knot of desires.
Hungry snarl. Small son.
Why do I have to love you?
How have you won?

Many commenters loved it, but some were put off — saying that as parents they couldn’t relate, that the poem’s grotesque figurative language (“insect,” “snail”) was dehumanizing, that perhaps this was the product of postpartum depression. Granted, I haven’t given birth, but I think that’s what I most admire about the poem: in writing about a physical experience I’ll never have, Stevenson has described my profoundest emotional experience. No other poem I know of so fully comprehends the vulnerability, the split-openness, the terrifying powerlessness that a new parent feels in the presence of the baby. Who is this tyrant who somehow holds entire human hearts in his tiny, incompetent hands?