honey and sting

I wake to snow.
The skylights are brighter,
confusing the order of the day.
What time is it?

In the quiet, my right ear
rings louder than ever,
souvenir of a long ago
infection or noise --
some impingement or stress
unnoticed at the time.

Life marks us.
If I were born again,
kindled purely from DNA,
a perfect unwinding of the plan,
unscarred and unscathed,
would I be me?

Sometimes I think,
let's roll it back, let's
do it again, but this time
without whatever it was
that set off Crohn's disease,
this time without cancer.
This time without that time I fell,
and broke my toe,
and broke my nose,
or got that pimple
that left a raised bump
my hand goes to again and again.

This time without the inflection of pain,
or shock of what I learned, too young,
about Jews and concentration camps,
and how my mother lost her hearing
from diphtheria, in Auschwitz.

My soul would be as sweet and clean
as the snow in my yard.
As precious.
As unwritten.

But would I be me?
In some sense we all come to this world
still unborn.
It is the world that, for all the horror it inflicts,
shapes us in a never-ending passage.
Until we find, somehow, our own birth cry,
a wail or a growl of defiance, rage, or joy.

Here I am, etched and knitted and healed.
Here is my life, spindled and bent,
and beautiful, in all that.

I feel the cold and enlivening air,
dream blessing in its softness,
whisper to the plants beneath,
"in time, in time."
Just so. Be marked, be torn,
take a breather, bemoan,
go to sleep, or rant and fight,
and when the time is right:
be born.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyiWkWcR86I

just keep blessing each other