You are called son, a pattern cut from between my hips
in a blaze of quiet knives and commands that summon

- even in mute signs - the purest dichotomy: life or not.
I meanwhile, senseless and stranded under lights,

opened and splayed like a frog in biology class,
bladder pushed aside in the rush,

am imago, assuming my own new name,
mother, amid the mad traffic of hormones.

From this need for naming there is no escape,
and for its complications, no known cure.

I am called prima gravida and you,
placenta praevia-deep transverse arrest-

-failed high forceps-foetal distress-
emergency caesarian section. These are not

the names I had in mind. How could they be?
Before your coming to me they did not signify.

At the bed-end, resting the clipboard on her neat white waist,
the morning sister looks over her bifocals and says

‘oh, you’ve had one with the lot, I see’.
A century ago we were called died in childbirth.

© Louise Oxley