Remembering Birth

And straining impossibly hard
to push some blood
up to those twenty-year-old-tendrils
(the memory glands if that’s what you call them?)
there is – one assumes – some ancient residue still left
of that fateful moment.
The one where it all began.

The one that’s often enlarged by us to be more
than biology presumes.
And yes, it might well be a long shot at best
but by some reckoning
here it is: the moment of my birth
with that clinical curtness, all white perhaps.
Or stainless steel. Blankets. Foreign laps.

There sadly appears to be no supernatural thrill
in it. Or god-like endowments made.

But you know the real one is where it matters:
hidden further into labyrinthine memory,
distant, less gaugeable, untracked. Where one spirit
was flowing out of another – disembodied –
one tiny fresh body
into the greater black.


Simon Peter Everett, 2010 ©