"Our Death is in Your Belly"

our death is in your belly
a mass of muscle and sinew
stitching with her own needle

four helixes into two

a ribbon dancer

pirouetting with our DNA

in a 40-week recital before leaping forth,

half-you-half-me and ending our lives our death is in your belly because before her we were strangers boy                  and                  girl

ping-ponging                  across                  the                  continent

until we collided hips into a moment

when we both forgot our names

shed our skins into each other

poured and swallowed our best intentions

two short lifetimes of sins and sorrows

into hope of something better than us both

our death is in your belly because once she arrives reforming us into something new

we will no longer be Self and Other

but Her

entire

and no shatter of time nor territory can unmake the magic we distilled into her cells

our death is in your belly bearing a name we have chosen but not yet bestowed a name she will shape with experiences chiseled from scraped knees and first kisses painting her legacy across the tongue of history until he speaks her story into the generations hence whatever name we articulate afterward, the echoed men and women will call her

the name trees have 

for earthquakes

the noun waves use

for tsunamis

or what shattered moons 

call the supernovae

that reduced them 

to asteroids

our death is in your belly and when she cuts umbilical the arrogant World will know his greatest sin was not anticipating her arrival not building enough bomb shelters to preserve his deceptions not assembling an army to resist her so she will leave in wreckage his broken promises turn into refugees the Should-Haves and Might-Have-Dones that civilizations left behind in the vapor around their stone monuments you

will be the mother who bore the joyous cataclysm

and I

will be the failure

she will rectify

in her own time

our death is in your belly

how we die

will be up to us

                  and what kills us

                  up to fate

but she will be our death

the last face we see

the last hand we hold

the last voice we hear

as the light dims in our irises

as the mechanics slow

to a dull whisper

as the organs take well-earned vacation

from life-long labor

and she,

looking back

will be the price paid

for all we have endured

she will be our death

the daughter to bury us both

first one,

then the other

she will be our death judging whether our lives be worthy of eulogy she will inscribe the epitaph telling the world what we have left behind whatever she writes

will be for her,

not us

for us,

she is what we left behind

she will forge the fire

our privilege was to light the flame

she will be our death and I can hear the rumblings of our doom when I press my ear against your belly

she sounds like gods 

of 6,000 mythologies ...

... trembling

she sounds like a love song 

stars sing to each other

she sounds like Four Horsemen 

before loosening themselves upon the World

she sounds like a poem 

just before it is spoken

she sounds like revolution 

wrapped around the first bullet

she sounds the whisper in the night 

that ignites 

the

Big

Bang

she sounds like the ache 

of our first kiss

when it was still partitioned on our lips knowing our next moment would end in death for us both

but a little girl we have yet to meet

would ferry us into the dark

unafraid of what may 

not 

come

next