POLYSYNDETON: HER PINK RIBBON
The pink ribbon shining through the dark room, that pink ribbon the nurse wore as a badge on that day, in the night into the dark part of my soul when she simply said, "take your baby out of here, you can always put him up for adoption later but take him out of here now" and her voice, that voice was a new path for me in that long corridor down the hospital room as I had come into Children's Hospital knowing that my baby was going to be taken, that I wasn't going to go home with my baby, I didn't even want to go home with my baby, and I didn't know how I could take my baby home but her pink hands spoke another story as she stood by my side and said, "here, this is how you diaper a baby" and over and over again she repeated the ritual of fold, pin, pin, fold over and over again until I could get the routine, until I knew how to fold, pin so that when she took me back to my bed in the ward I knew how to diaper if not a baby, a doll and then she asked the ladies on my ward to please donate a piece of clothing and I remember one lady holding her baby upside down like a chicken looking the baby over and she handed me a piece of clothing and each lady handed over a piece of clothing or receiving blanket and it happened just like that, just like that I was a mother ready to go home with my baby, maybe not like other mothers I knew cause I didn't have a home but I walked out of that hospital with Ned, my therapist, I walked out starting a journey I never thought I would and it was the nurse's pink sunshine, her pink face that shown that day and even Ned's did too when he asked to see the baby and taking down the blanket from his face Ned said, "it's been along time but I feel like the grandfather," but he was more than a grandfather, he was the rushing river coming down the stream holding me tight in its grip keeping me from tumbling over the rocks keeping me on the path of the gushing stream where the waterway wouldn't descend.
copyright2004Hadiyah Carlyle
Hadiyah Carlyle's writing appears in
Hadiyah holds a BA in History and an MSW from Rutger's University, as well as a certificate in Memoir Writing from the University of Washington Extension Program. She has taught "Writing as Healing"workshops and is a member of the International Women's Writing Guild (IWWG).
In the 1960s, Hadiyah earned an AA in welding from Laney College, Oakland and worked as an only woman welder for many years. But "that was another life." Now she's at work on her memoir.
POLYSYNDETON
pol-y-syn'-de-ton from Gk. poly- "many" and
syndeton "bound together with..."
Employing many conjunctions between clauses, often slowing the tempo or rhythm.
source: Brigham Young University
