Motherhood Diptych

Like a blade pressed to the artery

before exams are sat, reversed

rainfall of mortar boards, before

that first witness of a replica corpse

with convincing pews of veins,

before the reverencing encounter

with the real thing, an actual cadaver,

before the tutor blithely cut a giant horseshoe

into the sternum without a shock of blood,

peeled it back like a sticky carpet

revealing the organs in neat arrangement –

the blue canoes where once he breathed,

this man, the unheartlike heart, still purple,

its pale pipework flushed of every wish,

then the odd aubergine liver, failed,

the gut’s many long roads –

like a surgeon required to heal the ruptured

but still beating and quite naked heart

without anything before, not exams, calm

tutor uncurtaining the chest,

before the triumphant rainfall –

think of her forehead strung with clear pearls

under five theatre suns,

white moon of clock dragging doubt,

lonely chirrup of the ECG,

yet another blind cut she is forced to make –

here? how deep? scalpel or saw?

so too this daily shaping and saving four lives

with just my own

and a hundred wilted plants

to draw upon