i

Posted on 30/07/2014 Updated on 03/08/2014

  She labors as we wait
She’s premature. It’s late.
Time’s thick tongue dryly licks
Her lips; 0436.

The cervix, not complete
Holds a butt and little feet
There’s no cord, heart rate fine
I worry, bide my time.

Four people, one a fetus,
wait for day to greet us.
Morose, I begin to dwell
On what there is to tell

Of Mestizo Amerinds
Whose trouble never ends
In this our tortured land
Far South the Rio Grande,

How a child might survive,
To keep its i alive
Unfed, untaught, but still
Fly North on wings of will.

I spend my little life
With death and birth and strife
And when the poor can’t pay
Stroke the rich to save my day,

See somber children grow
Like years, they come and go,
Speaking countless whys,
And not so simple lies.

Then wonderwords arrive,
As ‘Why am i alive?’
Or ‘where was i then?
‘Will i be me again?’

Answers, unpersuasive,
Seem lies or are evasive;
Except a newborn’s i,
Each word’s a subtle lie,

Fluid as a bat in flight
Whose image defies sight,
Or the quantal ‘where’,
That seen is never there,

Or dreams where we surmise
That we are all alive.
Past, future, even time
No one can quite define.

My God! She is complete!
Unblock the arms and feet;
Pull the face, and curse;
Ask pushes of the nurse!

And with a lusty cry,
There comes another i
Into a newborn day
To blow my words away.