Sarah Temporal and Damien Becker: Poetic Express - Northern Rivers comes to Melbourne

Damien Becker: In the Back of the Ambulance

Three Secrets

I. 

I did not give birth to my daughter.
After labouring two days, three long nights,
she was trapped in the tight bindings of my body.
A doctor cut through to release her—

              maybe that doctor gave birth to my daughter.

There were dozens of people
who climbed from their beds in dim night and
converged on the fluorescent beacon of the hospital
to invite my baby into that white air—

               maybe they all gave birth to my daughter.

I surrendered to the table, made a kind of peace.
Lines ran into my outstretched arms
and a blue curtain dismembered
the lower half of my senses while

               the scalpel gave birth to my daughter.

My baby’s heart was steady as a drum
until she rose up stunned
through that surprising doorway

               as if she gave birth to herself—

when I could not. All I gave
were these inadequate
thanks.

II.

Later, I could not stop chasing the story of myself.
I found my likeness as the mother of Asclepius
when he was extracted from me:

               a myth that gave birth to my daughter. 

I found
my earliest human form in 1580                            my husband
took a knife to me                         the husband was a pigfarmer
and I lived            for a week.
Even after
the invention of anaesthetic….they sometimes refused to use it because God said,
Woman Must Suffer to Bring Forth Children.

I found
a woman upon whose body          history has carved               a thousand notches
to remember every incremental breakthrough.          …………She is supine in stone
in bas-relief           in charcoal drawings            always lifeless and naked
with all her secrets spilled out on the ground.
It turns my stomach to look at her
but I have to—

………….it is she
………….in her endless stillness
………….who gave birth to my daughter.

III.

They lay my baby down beside me.
Her tiny nose……………presses my cheek
her eyes………….seek me out
like she
has given birth
to me.

.

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