Handprints on the Womb

To know What it means to be human; To find the wisdom to become Homo sapiens: To live the love That burns; To remember, And to dream a world To life; To sing songs, to write poems, to tell stories; To taste the wind with our tongues And to listen to the leaves; To press our tiny hands To the edge of our womb world; To be amazed and terrified, At this awesome, awful world; To be born, Bloody, swollen, and full of possibility. I didn't know I was a poet until my daughter was born. That day, I wrote a poem. Then I began to go back through my old journals hidden in closets, pieces of paper tucked away in books. Napkins in the corner of my desk. I excavated poems from prose. And there it was.