Back in 1984, I gave a poetry reading at The Humanities in Medicine Conference sponsored by the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition. Afterwards, the Yale surgeon physician-writer Richard Selzer walked up to me, placed both hands over his heart, and proclaimed, “From such callow youth!”
I was so callow at the time that I had to look up the word “callow.”
This is the poem he was referring to.
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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. Then, a shrinking
back through time
as each cell of life decays
and recombines, dissolving
into fluid, flowing
into waves.
©1984 Kurt Biehl
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