Birth

I remember original beginnings
like the start of screams of life sucking away life.
I was born an, hideously enough, I was called living even as I was dying.
It was darkness before life and then life in the darkness as I squirmed to get free from the womb.
I was bound with a cord, then it was cut and I was free. But my sin was spanked away. Freedom is a sin?
My eyes were opened and disease was sucked out of my nostrils and ears. I was blood red reality; someone else's "sin."
And she should have screamed to see the action become me, pudgy with hairless wrinkles, a baby pig right for roasting. A sacrifice.
But she reached out, even with beads of sweat crowning her Queen, naming her Mother, and took her child.
And I was alive and, for the moment, I was the sunrise.

-Rachel Johnson, 1994