Rebirth after a medical procedure

Rebirth after a medical procedure

‘We are not born all at once, but by bits’. (Mary Antin)

The child comes out of sedation

Tottering like a new-born calf.

In this new world the air is gel

And her spine is water.

She drawls on ‘mummy’,

attempts to say, don’t leave me.

Because you left her earlier

in the hands of strange men in white coats;

all by herself in an unfamiliar room

where machines flickered and droned.

She remembers, she remembers,

and looks at you to say, you betrayed me.

You abandoned me to the machines.

She is being born into un-speckled light.

You watch as she lifts an eyelid, a finger.

She tries to sit and flops like a worm.

You catch her before her body thinks the thought.

Old neural pathways are re-fired.

Mother reflexes dulled by time

reawaken with alacrity.

She comes into wakefulness like a transitional species:

part arthropod and part vertebrate,

bendy at strange angles.

Slowly, slowly, she evolves a spinal chord

Slowly, slowly, she grows a tongue

Speech emerges.

‘Mummy’, she says without slurring,

‘Take me home’.

A whole sentence running like a brook;

no, a holy river drowning you with relief.

You wheelchair her to the car.

And it feels like you have been back

from the rivers of Babylon.

You could not sing then.

But now you whistle through hospital corridors

like a pirate on a seized ship.

She is your catch, your prize.

She is a legend.