Beautiful Ogres
Doctor, I was young and apple-green
when first tickled by the rub of love
the nub, the hub, the nexus of love-making.
We were spooning afterwards
her belly against my spine when
the tickle came. Almost asleep, I
started, flinched, as if a bug was between us.
Later, when she said
- I'm pregnant -
I knew that I'd known, and why
everafter spoonings had been twitchy:
the stirrings of my son's nascent life.
The second time, I
called her to me, my daughter-to-be,
knew from the moment of fusion
who she was, her looks, her personality
in a vision that remains true now, as she unfolds.
The third time
a decade later, was so very different
a different woman, a different time in my life
there was resistance to the concept of conception
a slowness to the quickening, too many
children all ready, she said, not enough money
and several other practical considerations.
Yet the soul of the child
knowing nothing of practical considerations
responding only to our responses, taking the
physical for the spiritual, the carnal for the mystic
relentlessly pleads for the beauty of existence until
in a moment of reckless submission to her will, I make her
and the planet tilts
and the heavens split
and we all three know the truth of it - She is Here, Now.
Ah, but I am not hosting
and having no control
I lose her
to practical considerations.
And in my great despair I've come to you now, doctor,
to ask a boon:
trap my beautiful ogres
and silence their pleadings
I can no longer bear to hear their cries, their laughter.
Robert Douglas Hickey |
