October 4th 2003
Our future is a free flying kite
or a gull or a scarf on the wind.
I bend gracefully to thank and smile,
thank and smile; a ballerina
in a music box.
That night I unpin my hair,
in a ritual undressing,
a re-virgining of my whole self,
it seems absolutely right
that the roots at my scalp ache,
as if some pain is necessary.
We lay together in the room
with the panoramic views
stretching sea wards.
The next day we joke,
we hope.
Diagnosis
It’s on both sides, the problem.
Me, with my cystic ovaries; black spheres
bunching like grapes; beating
our eggs to a short death. Him,
with slack swimmers, sperm floundering
on the rim of my cervix, the sky
of my uterus remaining dark.
The five years we’ve been trying
to conceive: a waste of time.
Those months I was late, a lie
told by my body. I’m embarrassed.
We’ve fooled ourselves, each other.
The doctor gets my name wrong.
I don’t correct him.
Embryo Transfer
I am stitched shut with you. My mouth
is sewn tight, in case I jinx you, my limbs
are stitched to my sides in case I move
too much and dislodge you. My heart,
usually so open and bloody, has its two halves
sewn together; a rubber butterfly pinned
to my ribs. No daylight gets in through our sutures,
we have clasped shut our cocoon
for two weeks. In exactly fourteen days,
that morning will arrive and you may
be carried away, a mote of a dream
on the razor edge slant of the morning’s light.
Until then let me keep you with me,
held fast with blood and imagination,
longing and love.
Wendy Pratt is a full-time poet and freelance writer living in North Yorkshire, UK. You can buy her latest book, Gifts the Mole Gave Me here: Valley Press and find out more about her work a here: Wendy’s website. Wendy is available for poetry commissions, workshop facilitating and freelance feature and blog writing work. Her fifth collection, When I Think of My Body as a Horse, will be published by Valley Press in the near future.
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