Response to "Happy Birthday" by Hunter Dobbins

To start off, this poem takes a read or three to really understand, which isn't necessarily bad but I think some readers may be a little more passive and skip over it.  There are some really great lines like

"the mending of regret with your hands" which conveys to me someone trying to actively fix their past mistakes.  I also really liked that "son" was placed in its own line - I really thought that emphasized it nicely.  I also thought your use of punctuation and line breaks was really well done for the most part.  The quotes used on the last "its" also served very nicely to emphasize the idea behind the poem.  There is some good word usage especially with "o" sounds and a lot of lines have self contained alliteration and assonance that work well. 

Your poem seems to be about abortion, which I didn't totally comprehend until the third time I read it, I think that meaning could be misconstrued pretty easily though.  There are a few lines that I still do not understand however, mainly, "If this is life, why was it stolen" is the idea that once something is conceived it is alive? I'm pretty unsure about what the meaning of this is.  Also  the third long stanza is unclear to me - is the idea that abortion isn't illegal in an alternate reality or something?  That seems out of place considering it is legal now.  Finally, I don't understand the line "Missing the days of building its cage" I don't really understand what this is about besides an unborn baby, maybe that "its" could be emphasized in the same way as the last one.  There are also an end ryhme that seems out of place in the second long stanza. 

I think this poem could be really good but right now it seems a little abstract and maybe overly complicated.  There are a few instances of intended symbolism/imagery that I don't connect anything to.  But I think that with a little more use of imagery this poem could be great!