Cesarean Section Poem by Paul Hartal

On a sunny day of Taurus
they cut her abdomen.
With stainless scalpels
the surgeons unlatched her uterus
and out of her slashed womb,
touching with their sterile gloves
the enigma of an enclosed but remote self,
they pulled out the boy crying,
covered with blood,
incised forever
with the trauma of a violent birth,
a ferocious portal to light,
a brutal entrance into the world
through the skillful horror
of a Caesarean section.

Many days passed since then
and they have grown wild,
like cranberries and black currants,
sprouting from an invisible umbilical cord
of drifting bond and unsevered lineage.
And while the untamed river
of memory flows,
somehow
he still remembers his birth
as a holographic record,
an engram in the brain cells,
wrapped in the charcoal void
of the mystery of being,
an approaching lullaby,
and the silence of
an unborn Mozart sonata.