Challenging Poetry

Australia: the breath of life

in the instant I first moved
and my mother felt me
in her belly, and called my father
to touch me, but the flutter
was too small, she stood
in a park near cacti
and Joshua trees and grapefruit
trees and Gila monsters
who hide unless disturbed
then attack—is it any wonder
that I am prickly and sour
with poison on my fangs
and a wish to hide myself away
undisturbed.

line count: 14

Author's Note ▶︎

For this poem, I drew upon one of the indigenous beliefs from Australia, that the spirit of a child enters the mother at the point in which she feels the baby first move (around the fifth month), and so the spirit of the child is from that point in the land. That caught my imagination, because I have always felt a kinship to the land of my birth (I was born in Arizona, in the Sonoran desert) even though I haven't lived there since I was about four months old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime