SOME VERSES for MY BIRTHDAY

Many of you know I have belonged to a writing  group for years.

We meet on Mondays for two hours and a leader gives prompts to which each responds in any way they wish and in any style or format. There's a time limit and depending on how many are present at each session,we usually manage two prompts per session. Most of us read out loud to the group but there is no obligation to share. Responses to a piece are confined to 'what I remember' or what I liked'. This is not about restructuring or critiquing.We've been on a long holiday break with an extra stretch due to the MLK Holiday, so this first prompt of our Winter session was sent by mail:

January by William Carlos Williams

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:

Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music. 

~*~

The first Cut

(some verses for my seventy fifth birthday)

by Michelle Slater

Sirens silenced the howling winds.
A bloody trail marked the steps
of a shocked mother rushed
through Emergency to

the operating theater.

An incision of 6 inches was made
through her lower abdomen,
then a second incision
opened her uterus.
I was delivered.

Thus unto this rude world I came.

Elsewhere, my father was

told I was probably dead.

It proved quite untrue

I howled the proof.

The storm raged all night and day.

I was swaddled and held apart.

In recovery, unavailable,

drugged to sleep, my

wounded mother.

What I felt I can not remember,

only imagine the pain of it,

the loneliness and fear

of that brutal welcome

hearing wind howl.

Childhood amnesia veils it all

for many years until one day

a bleeding wound becomes

the memory of something.

Howling confirms it.

This second cut sinks way down,

down to the level of the first,

carries it upward where
it joins the current pain.

Howling's the familiar.

It goes on like that into adolescence,

through adulthood and to old age,

so that every cut of every kind

might call the first to mind,

make a calm wind howl.

~*~

Actual Birth by Surgery

https://youtu.be/KH4MecnYiFk