Everything you need to understand or teach Maternity by Anna Swir.
The Event
The first four lines of "Maternity" deal with the obvious topic of life. However, Swir looks at birth in terms of both a new life, the baby, and a sacrificed life, that of the mother. Using the first person, Swir says "I gave birth to life," not "I gave birth to a baby" or "a child" or anything yet connected to her as a human. Rather, Swir is focused on the product of birth as a living creature that not only has a birth, but also will have a death and a life in between. This perspective is extended in the second sentence (lines 2—4) with the use of what appears to be an odd word choice: "entrails." When discussing birth, one usually uses terms such as "womb" or "uterus" or even "belly." Entrails has the meaning of guts or intestines. Unless Swir's biology is faulty, she chose "entrails" to... View more of the Maternity Summary
