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MISSING by Jane Shore These children's faces printed on a milk carton-- a boy and a girl smiling for their school photographs; each head stuck atop a column of vital statistics: date of birth, height and weight, color of eyes and hair. On a carton of milk. Half gallon, a quart. Of what use is the body's container, the mother weeping milk or tears. No amount of crying will hold it back once it has begun its journey as you bend all night over the toilet, over a fresh bowl of water. Coins of blood splattering the tile floor as though a murder had been committed. Something wasn't right, they say, you are lucky. Too soon to glimpse the evidence of gender, or to hear a heartbeat. Put away the baby book, the list of names. There are four thousand, at least, to choose from. No need now to know their derivations, their meanings. Faces pass you in the supermarket as you push the wire cart down the aisles. The police artist flips through pages of eyes and noses, assembling a face, sliding the clear cellophane panels into place. You take a quart of milk. Face after face, smiling obedient soldiers, march in even rows in the cold glass case.
U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass describes this poem as “one that gets at the kinds of deep sadness we carry around . . . its message is like braiding. It starts with the image of those faces of lost children on milk cartons and twines it around the experience of a lost pregnancy.”
''Missing'' by Jane Shore
The poet uses free verse for most of the poem. She uses end rhyme only briefly in the last two stanzas. She repeats the word ''face'' five times, to emphasize the ones she is forced to look at, but also to make the absence of her own baby's face more poignant.
The poet is reminded of the emotional pain of her own miscarriage while viewing the missing children found on milk cartons in her grocery's dairy aisle. She implies an analogy of the cold glass cases to a morgue. Her tone is bitter and ironic, because she has been referred to as ''lucky'' since she has no face or features to miss in her own child, who wasn't developed enough in the womb. Her child isn't missing, it's just gone. She still seems numbed by that realization while shopping at the store.
