This poem, also from my collection Realisations, predicts the feeling of completing surgery, even before I began living full-time in my authentic gender. Would it be like this? I didn’t read it for a very long time, I actually thought it a bit presumptuous. I read it two days after coming home from hospital. I cried. I would not rewrite a single word.
Hold this day, this birth day
write it in your diary, send me cards.
Never has a vaginal passage
delivered such a child as this –
she is an inversion of another
a restoration, a renaissance.
And this is her day, emerging
without cries, or protest, or recoil
but claiming birth-right almost
in defiance of everything umbilical –
with pain, blood, trauma and delivery
come to claim her world, her way.
Waking, ethereal, calm, complete
from mists of anaesthesia, almost in
disbelief at her prior parent, pregnant
with this progeny lain so long –
a gestation – no, an indigestion,
an indignity of containment.
I grasp this day, this birth day
red date in every diary, calendar
every future memory, mark and
milestone – and slip into life.
2012 © Andie Davidson
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