What makes a life?

This stunning poem, about the mystery of life and spontaneous generation, was written by the Irish poet Sinead Morrissey when she was pregnant with her first child. We were lucky enough to hear a private poetry reading by her in Belfast on England Semester last year, and I was struck by her humility and genuine sense of wonder. How can I possibly write anything worth reading when I've just re-visited one of the most awe-inspiring pieces of literature that I know of? Instead, I chose to copy the poem out of my copy of her book. Enjoy.

Matter

from Through the Square Window by Sinead Morrissey

Aristotle observed and recorded it all-

that out of rainwater, the marrow

of the human spine, foam from the sea,

or the putrefying carcasses of bulls and horses

spring living beings: frogs, serpents, anchovies,

bees and scarabs, locusts, weevils, maggots.

St Augustine agreed: what matter that the smallest

(and most meddlesome) of God’s creatures

find no mention in the chronicle of the Ark?

So long as alluvial mud remained, or rotted

wood, of rinsed white bones of crocodiles

after the wash abated and the salvaged couple

and their braying entourage were pitched

on top of Ararat, wasps and gnats and fleas

would manifest once more in clouds and colonies

without a union of the sexes (like Mary)

and the earth would effortlessly teem.

Recipes for rats and ‘small white puppies

a child might play with’ followed

during the Middle Ages, which typically included

hay, excrement, dirty shirts, wool

simmered for an hour then hung to dry

in an outhouse or chicken coop

(the air of such places being itself

so mutable and laden with infusoria,

it acts as a bridge to live). Golems

moulded from clay still needed a spell

to keep them animated, as though by

growing bigger and more complicated,

the offspring of the elements

were in danger of winding down,

yet Paracelsus, arch-advocate of decay,

saw no reason not to apply

the laws of spontaneous generation

to ourselves: let the semen of a man

putrefy itself for forty days in a sealed

cucurbite, it shall begin, at last, to live.

Fed on an arcanum of human blood

and kept in darkness, his fleet homunculus

had all the features of a human child.

Leeuwenhoek bore this experiment in mind

when, decades later, using his own microscope,

he scrutinized his sperm, magnified

as much as three hundred times and fashioned

like a bell, with the wrought perfection

of a tiny man curled inside each globule.

Ovists may have envisaged instead

a sacred cabinet of children, encased

inside each egg, opening in time

both backwards and forwards

to the breaking of Eve and the End

of the World, the likelihood remained:

whether one believed in this, or the evidence

of a light-blanched workshop and a knack

for polished glass, or whether one went back

to what the Greeks expressed

as the facts of reproduction,

a woman’s quest for contraception,

stacked against the odds of dogged visitors

finding lodging in the womb

at any beckoning, was hopeless.

No wonder Soranus suggested water from blacksmiths’.

No wonder olive oil, the pulp of a pomegranate,

honey, pine resin, mercury, beeswax,

pennyroyal, tobacco juice, arrowroot, tansy

were burnt, brewed, inhaled, ingested,

inserted into the cervix, or buried in fields left fallow

if the coppery stain of menstruation

persisted into the seventh day.

No wonder witches consulted the sky.

And though I know, thanks in part to Pasteur–

to his gauze impediments and penchant

for boiling–how your came to enter,

how you came to roll and hiccup and kick

against the windowless dark, feet to my heart

and skull to the pelvic cradle, I still think

of our lovemaking as a kind of door

to wherever you were, waiting in matter,

spooled into a form I have not yet been shown

by the umprompted action of nature,

by something corrupting in an earthenware pot

in Corinth, say, or Kingstown.

Stay the wind on a river eight weeks after equinox–

witness blue-green mayflies lift off

like a shaken blanket; add algae

and alchemical stones to the lake floor

in the strengthening teeth of winter, what swans.

--
Happy Saturday. :]