Seasons, senses & self: Day 16
Son
The winning sperm headbutts the egg’s membrane
and penetrates. They melt into each other.
The chromosomes pair off. The new cell doubles
and quadruples, again and again. A hollow
ball of cells starts to colonise
the endometrium: the placenta
channels nutrients and oxygen,
immune defences. Neural tube. A spine.
A human fish, with a life-rope to its belly.
Long before evolving to dry land,
buds burst to limbs. Somersaults. Kicking
against the cramp. Two hearts beating. Then
the young hero forces his way out –
ungrateful wretch! Sudden cold. Gulped air.
Seasons, Senses & Self: a daily series
As I’ve said before, there are many different approaches to writing about your life (or someone else’s). Today I offer you the first two stanzas of a poem in my book, A Place to Keep My Shadow. (Auto)biographies don’t usually include the embryonic stage. But why shouldn’t they, whether that’s in poetry or prose – or simply a list of diary entries during pregnancy? And why shouldn’t a poem be on a scientific theme?
Personally, I enjoy the sound of words in any language, including the language of biology. In creative writing, I’m free to mix and match technical and colloquial vocabulary. And when I’m reading, the newness and strangeness of words I don’t understand intrigues me.
***
In case you’re interested in poetic technicalities – the poem (as I read it) has five stressed syllables per line, and about five unstressed syllables: The winning sperm headbutts the egg’s membrane
. So it’s roughly in “iambic pentameter” (where each line has alternating stressed and unstressed syllables – as in conversational English, the stressed syllables are a bit louder).
This has been one of the commonest rhythms* in English poetry for over 600 years. Chaucer used it in rhyming couplets (pairs of lines) for The Canterbury Titles. Shakespeare used it for all his plays (mostly as ‘blank verse’ – unrhyming iambic pentameter). In his later plays, his iambic pentameter gets lets strict – the rhythm is more conversational.
But forget the fancy words – read poems aloud. Try reading a poem like an actor, then read it again as if you had a backing drum. It’s the feel of the sound that matters.
[*Technically these patterns are called metres rather than rhythms – some people argue that the rhythm of a poem is a different thing. The metre is like the underlying beat a jazz drummer hears in his head – the rhythm they play doesn’t slavishly follow the beat.]