Did I ask to be born?

Prose I can easily understand, even if I don't always get all the subtexts.  But, poetry is different. Right from the old school days, I have been puzzled that the poem's words say one thing and then the interpretation is always something very different.  Which has then led to wonder why poets don't say what they mean in a straightforward way.  No wonder then that women, with their complicated conversations of hidden meanings, love poems and poets ;)

The poem here, from The New Yorker, seems straightforward enough.  I think I get it.  But, I bet that I don't have a clue what the poem is all about; thankfully, unlike the old days, there is no quarterly exam ;)

We don't ask to be born.  As a comedian (from Brazil was he?) put it, we were once nothing but a sperm, with a dick and an asshole as neighbors!

Our creators--father and mother--perhaps got together for her looks and his money, or for his looks and her money, or for whatever reason.  Maybe they wanted a boy and they kept trying.  An aunt of mine is supposed to have exclaimed "girl again?" after the third child also turning out to be a girl!  the cosmos being a comedian, well, that girl also ended up having a daughter ;)

We don't ask to be born a boy or a girl.  There are people struggling with their inner boy trapped in a girl's body, or vice versa.  They didn't ask that either.

Once we are born, we struggle to make sense of it all. We rush from pillar to post, move from place to place, read and listen to the great minds, in search of the meaning of life.

The poet says, "I want to say that love is the meaning, but I think that love may be the means, what we ask with."

All you need is love!

I Cannot Say I Did Not

By Sharon Olds

I cannot say I did not ask
to be born. I asked with my mother’s beauty,
and her money. I asked with my father’s desire
for his orgasms and for my mother’s money.
I asked with the cradle my sister had grown out of.
I asked with my mother’s longing for a son,
I asked with patriarchy. I asked
with the milk that would well in her breasts, needing to be
drained by a little, living pump.
I asked with my sister’s hand-me-downs, lying
folded. I asked with geometry, with
origami, with swimming, with sewing, with
what my mind would thirst to learn.
Before I existed, I asked, with the love of my
children, to exist, and with the love of their children.
Did I ask with my tiny flat lungs
for a long portion of breaths? Did I ask
with the space in the ground, like a portion of breath,
where my body will rest, when it is motionless,
when its elements move back into the earth?
I asked, with everything I did not
have, to be born. And nowhere in any
of it was there meaning, there was only the asking
for being, and then the being, the turn
taken. I want to say that love
is the meaning, but I think that love may be
the means, what we ask with.