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Poems

Iron Butterfly Dec 2013
A warning from the Surgeon General:

WARNING. This beverage contains alcohol.
It should not be consumed by pregnant women.
No, not even a little, no not even early on,
Or in a certain trimester, no, not at all.

WARNING: There is a myth out there
That says that small amounts of alcohol
Can be beneficial for a child.
This is false. There is no benefit.
Why, then, take a risk?

WARNING. There is a life within you now.
It breathes the air you breathe,
Your blood runs through its veins.

WARNING: Your misjudgment may drown it.
Your alcohol-soaked impairment may cost your child
A chance at a normal start.

WARNING: FASD doesn’t just stand for
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.
It also stands for From Alcohol Stems Death-
Death of a chance at true normalcy,
Possibly death of your child.
Beware, take care.

WARNING: What you do now
Cannot later be undone.
For an additional prompt on FASD, I chose to imagine what a poetic warning might look like if posted as a "Surgeon General" warning on the back of a bottle of alcoholic beverage.
Iron Butterfly Dec 2013
Is it worth it, your moment of pleasure?
Is this all worth forgetting the world?
Is that one moment worth the rest of a life,
Your child’s, your boy or girl’s?

Consequence is a stain you can’t erase.
I hope you know, your actions stick around.
Because if you don’t hesitate a while,
And stop to think, and put that bottle down,

You will have to ask, was it worth it?
Was my oversight worth all this strife and woe?
Was it worth all the consequences later?
And you’ll see, far too late, the answer’s no.

For your now ”harmless” moments of brief pleasure,
Your child could be an innocent victim, dealing
With FASD for the rest of their natural life-
So for their sake, mind your destructive “healing”.
The second of a set of 3 poems generating FASD awareness that I wrote for my psychology class. This one is more a "don't drink while pregnant" warning than a perspective piece. It is also more addressed to mothers who simply ignore warnings about alcohol as opposed to ones physically addicted to the substance.