Transformation She is the goddess of creation
and destruction, embodied.
Giving birth is a vision quest,
a fire walk, innate to her biology.
She births her baby and herself
through the round window
of her cervix as it opens
into motherhood, the spiral turns
of her baby’s head
through the slippery canal
where anything can happen.
Birth, always unpredictable,
follows the patterned, complex
origami of her living.
In the memory of her own birth,
she incorporates her mother,
how she resists and how she yields
to trust the bodies, joined together,
know this separation journey,
the breath, the cutting of the cord.
She stands, squats, growls,
her fierce teeth bared, cries out
and dances the accelerating
rhythm of contractions, awash in blood,
body fluids, her baby’s and her own.
Through the convoluted passage
of her self, she ushers time,
steps into the unknown.
Life requires this of a mother:
to give the child she has created,
to a future made of dreams. Sylvia Bortin |
