DNA Dreams
I don’t know how or when
Like seeds in the spring
Or maybe late winter
No one knows the exact second or time
Not voices in the wind or sky
Knows when they germinate
Voices I hear
They say I grew like seeds, like saplings
Sudden and harsh
In search of me
I try to find
WHEN
The very second
I was fertilized and spreading
Cells separating by the hundreds
The branches of night
Reached into my mother’s womb
Cold chilly fingers
Wet and black
Touching the zygote
Soon to be a fetus
Not words but voices
The trees still talk to me
Their fingers slap me
In windy alleys
And on window panes
Not silence
But a chorus heard
In their shuddering leaves
And groaning stumps
They sing to me
In singing non-words
Of safety and suspicion
Someone who knows nothing
Of trees and my cells
Their DNA combined
They look at me
Scientists, doctors, society
And see limbs that are not limbs but branches
Unfastened and open
My dress spills off me
Like leaves in the fall
My lovers crawl in me
Like squirrels and tree frogs
And bury their nuts
In my holes and crevices
The darkness
From the beginning
And at the very end
With me in my core
My trunk
My womb
Unlike men
I hold it like a child
Until a child will fill this space
Forgotten wings
A child in my womb
A refugee bird
No feathers or beak
But every man has these protrusions
On his shoulder blades
Ever since angels fell
To that fire
Created by another angel
To capture all in anger or sadness
Somehow, women, the rib, always get blamed
We are original sin
But the angels were men
Arrows, fire and flowers
Smelling like heaven
Shook from the sky
Trees, only trees
Know the whole story
God cursed them with bearing fruit
The first faint lie
Women and trees
Bearing fruit and cut down
Sliced into magazine pages or on pages
Planets go by
And the earth hurtles toward final wonderings
But the trees and I
We know
God won’t show
Until the men stop
Returning alone
From exploration
Claiming kinship we,
Trees and women,
Can never possess.
October 8, 1998
