Unborn
The butterflies
and the bees
and the hummingbirds
are mocking me
dancing and flitt-er-ing and
twittering by my bedroom
window, in my garden,
on campus, where I
work, by the bushes,
where I
park my car
And when I feel most dark
they frighten me with
a “tzt…tzt…tzt”,
and I start
like a rabbit
back
to life
Maybe they are mocking me
because I am too human,
too dark,
too weighed
down to see
the benefit of lightness,
of an eight and a half week life span –
to take joy in and
savor the movement of
the earth around
the sun
the sun upon my face
my face into the
ocean breeze.
Maybe it
(no, not “it”, “the baby” “my baby”)
decided
being a human was
too heavy an existence and that
being
lighter than a penny
would outshine
a life of unflinching
unrelenting
spinning
around the sun
ten’s-of thousand’s-of-who-
can-keep-count
times
Fuzzy
Bird Song
Natalie D-Napoleon was raised on a farm on the outskirts of, Perth, Western Australia. She began writing poetry at ten years of age to cure her childhood insomnia. For 20 years she toured and performed as a singer-songwriter playing shows from Sweden, across Australia and in the United States. Currently, she lives in California with her husband and five year old son and works as a writing tutor at a city college while completing a Master of Arts in Writing online. She has had short stories, poetry and editorials published at The Manifest-Station, Literary Orphans, LA Yoga Magazine and The Santa Barbara News-Press.
Citation for erasure poems: Emily Wright, The Sands of My Life, Tales of the Mojave Road Publishing Company, 1994.
