Births
We will never remember dying.
We were so patient
about being,
noting down
the numbers, the days,
the years and the months,
the hair, the mouths we kissed,
but that moment of dying:
we surrender it without a note,
we give it to others as remembrance
or we give it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we keep
the memory of our birth,
though being born was important and fresh:
and now you don't even remember one detail,
you haven't kept even a branch
of the first light.
It's well known that we are born.
It's well known that in the room
or in the woods
or in the hut in the fisherman's district
or in the crackling canefields
there is a very unusual silence,
a moment solemn as wood,
and a woman gets ready to give birth.
It's well known that we were born.
But of the profound jolt
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and crying and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition or shudder
of the electric essence that takes on
one more body like a living cup,
and of that disinhabited woman,
the mother who is left there with her blood
and her torn fullness
and her end and beginning, and the disorder
that troubles the pulse, the floor, the blankets,
until everything gathers and adds
one more knot to the thread of life:
nothing, there is nothing left in your memory
of the fierce sea that lifted like a wave
and knocked down a dark apple from the tree.
The only thing you remember is your life.
--Pablo Neruda
As my baby's final weaning days weave in and out in slow motion, nearing the crossing over point, I find myself thinking about my childrens' births. So very many new babies have come in this year, into the glorious tribe. And so many elders have passed along their memories and ways to us to hand down, across and down further still. I feel ceremonious and close to the bone about...everything.
As friends plan new babies for next year and adopted babes dash into the lives of others, I am reminded of how sacred the mere act is. Dear Pablo is so right. We don't remember a lick of it. The rush of it. The story of the day.The brightness of the room, or the slick darkness of it. The peace or the chaos. I want to believe that our bodies remember even when our minds fail to. That we carry the minute and the moment with us, as our badge of honor to exist fruitfully and completely.
