Back in 1984, when I attended the Humanities in Medicine Conference sponsored by the William Carlos WIlliams Competition, I read this poem along with six others. After the reading, Richard Selzer walked up to me and in reference to the juxtaposition of birth and death in this poem proclaimed, “From such callow youth!” while clasping both hands over his heart. I was so callow at the time that I had to look up the word “callow.”
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WHEN WE WERE ONE
It was a chance meeting
in the night that brought
me together, my two halves
became whole within you.
As I grew, suspended
in time, zygote to
blastomere, morula
to blastocyst, embryo
to fetus; I had no
awareness, no sense
of the journey
just begun. Floating
within your ontogenous
sea, your body
enveloped, your warmth
sustained; we were one.
.
But those waters have long since broken and we are oceans
apart, now. I search within
for those lost memories, a sense of
how it felt; for this is what death
must be like, a reversal
of the process, a sucking back
into the womb, quiet,
dark, effortless. A shrinking
back through time
as each cell of life decays
then recombines, dissolving
into fluid, flowing
into waves.
©1984 Kurt Biehl
