A Premature Revelation (2012)

In 2012, still a relative newbie to poetry, I was using news stories as inspiration for my poems. By the spring of that year I had taken measures to improve my skills, including joining a very good workshopping group and enrolling in a university-taught writing course, and I can see, looking back, how this poem had benefited from these steps. The poem itself is self-explanatory and not without merit.

A Premature Revelation

Luz Milagros was found alive in an Argentinian morgue twelve hours after her birth in April 2012.

Before I forget ever being a part

of my mother—her liver, kidneys,

bowel and bladder my giblet siblings,

like mandarin segments suspended in a jelly

—I would recall just once the soothing sloosh

of words whispered sweetly through aspic.

Mother spread open, a ripened avocado,

her insides turned outward, and there

I lay, the waxen stone, nestling

in her guacamole flesh.

It happened so quickly. It took all my will

to stay dead to the theatricals,

bright lights and howls, as I was back-passed

to a handy casket of stainless steel.

As the lid was sealed, I drew my primal 

breath. The shock of surgical steel

 

bled through folds of winding cloth 

and leached the last of mother’s warmth. 

Only then I opened my eyes

to the absurdity inherent in my lot.

Life, my life, though eventful, was over 

in the ping of an ECG machine,

and alone I tired of its telling and telling,

its diaphanous plot, its premature ending.

The seal of my tomb broke with a sharp

intake of breath, and I was reborn,

arriving in Argentina, infant philosopher,

and instant sensation. All at once

hunger spoke my name, and succour came

at the teat of a gorged and weeping breast.

Mother’s milk tasted of sweet avocado 

pressed from her reconstituted flesh.