The Child Who Cried in the Womb

 

 

I imagine the setting suited her—a pliant container

accommodating her will, its membrane stretching

in perfect affirmation of her reach,

even the assorted sounds and the light filtering in

—yes, there was a kind of light—merging,

reverberating her own pulsing song.

 

But her beginning must have been uncertain,

a winter gestation—nature seeking closure,

erasure of another cycle. The frost a downy lining

for a final bed, the cold’s stinging reminder

that the body is but vulnerable nerve, tenuous

flesh. Being a seed, she was expected,

like all seeds, to endure by turning,

first inward to fatten her own heart,

then outward to bloom in vegetable beatitude.

 

Yet conceived in such a time, she would inherit

the sorrows of that season, the void left by migrant birds,

the sadness of all those who cannot see past interrupted joy. 

And into her peaceful estuary would come waves of discontent—

the daily worries of her would-be father, the drum-tide

of her would-be mother’s fears—echoes

of that territory outside herself,

its airy vastness churning, buffeting….

 

The water soothed these discomforts, so she cried.

 

Perhaps then she pondered a permanent stay,

that way she needn’t decipher the world beyond her boundaries,

its rules or who’d made them,

or navigate the errant paths they’d laid.

In the primordial privacy of her little house,

she had sovereignty. She had the leisure

of unhurried desire and idea.

 

Later, she would only vaguely remember having relinquished Paradise—

shedding the supple, snug gourd,

amniotic dream giving way to the quickening

of body, tongue, speech,

blossoming from her own tears.