When the egg was fertilized, stirred, ready.

I was already on my way.

Had a fleeting sense that 
“oh, this is not going to end well.“

There was something wrong
Too late to turn back.
Luck of the draw.
Law of Life.
Natural selection.

The woman who would carry, birth me 
did not want
to go through
this again.

Come what may…
The second I arrived in the fertile seed,
she knew
I felt her heart drop.

She had her reasons. 
Childbirth was life or death in those days.
And she had once almost died.
She also may have remembered her own mother’s
failed attempt to stop a beloved
brother with a hat pin,
leaving permanent disfiguring evidence,
lifelong pain,
moral stain.

But I was on the way. For better or worse,
’til death do us part….
Just not the hat pin.
(I knew none of that yet.
They don’t tell us everything.
But thank you.)  

Who said God doesn’t play dice?

Sorry, Ma. He does. 

Each body has its own unique,
peculiar bio-chemical, genetic soup
sour, sweet, full of loaded dice,
genetic time bombs, gifts. .

The spirit is destined to whip
all of that
into shape.
Eventually.
If it can.

But from the beginning
it gets drugged by the soup
and the humidity and noise,
and confused until
gradually, imperfectly
it forgets where it came from 

Almost. Almost. 
That’s where Hope lives.

The spirit swims in confusion, involuntary 
emotions, unfamiliar sensation,
Surrounded in life by other spirits—
As confused, or to one degree or another. 

And all of those things stiffen into a
garbled outline of a life
written in pencil,
designed for erasures and editing.

The creator gambles, 
has set in motion a universe of
a vastness unbelievable;
Of blinding violence
numinous beauty
cruel randomness, 

But it is all aware,

alive,

seeking.

It is us and we are made of it.

As our instruments peer deeper and
deeper into the seething heart of creation,
we one 

Day may see a question mark
Or an eye,
looking back at us.

Rejoicing.