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Vicci Bentley

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Birth

is not a concept I can embrace readily
having forgotten, somehow, to give and of course
not recalling my own,

unless I think of floating, not quite belly up,
shushed and lulled by the ocean – that
mother of all birthing pools – whose

saltsoup plasmas our channels, keeps
our cells, ourselves abreast; so that it
comes as no surprise when skinny-dipping infants

splash and thrash, then just as suddenly
stroke the cobalt with fluent limbs
that part ripples limpid as memory.

I have plunged through brine to the seabed –
that deeper earth – to shimmy through rock gardens,
coral forests and swirling, sandbottom valleys like any other

original fish dodging the poisongrass of anemones,
the ponderous flight of the shadowy ray,
the rasping handshake of basking lobsters

dark as deepsea sapphire, to be electrified by
lightening shoals of angels – teeming and familiar
waves of aquamarine –

until my hot lungs urged the kickpush upwards
to burst through to the gasping shock of surf, of dazzling sky,
back to the cradling arc of sand that reminds us

how near, how far we are from where we began.

Vicci Bentley is a women’s magazine journalist and writes poems for light relief.

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