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ovenbird
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i wonder
if it ever strikes you
the strangeness
of the human being
who grew for nine months
inside of you
–raze
from half_asleep_poems 220803
There is, perhaps, nothing stranger than feeling a life take shape inside of you. You can’t see it, you can only feel it. The way its curving back presses into your searching hand. The way its foot kicks the underside of your ribs (a place no one else will ever touch again until carrion eaters pick the meat from your bones). The way it spins like a sea otter in the ocean that now resides in your expanding womb.
And then that whole secret interior world vanishes in a rush of water and blood and pain, and the thing that you held like the rarest pearl is no longer a part of you at all, but a breathing life that stretches into a person who will never know you fully because all your identities will be obscured under the thick blanket of motherhood.
You will watch this child grow up. One day you will watch them leave. They are at once closer to you than any person alive and completely unknowable. This life you made from the tiniest fragments of yourself is not something you can keep, and I don’t know how to carry the duality of grief and relief that is tied into that messy truth.
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