Poetry

Things did not turn out
as perfectly as we had hoped. When
the doctors
extracted him
from the womb, there he was
 
a twisted pretzel of
a person, this child
who was
to be
perfect,
 
shaking and bloody
as a wounded bird and
not much different:
 
from the bony shoulders,
like broken wings,
crooked arms splayed up
to the curled hands
that seemed jammed
under a quivering
chin
attached, haphazardly,
to a crooked head.
 
Hips
perpendicular to
a withered torso,
legs running
up the sides of a pruney chest—
 
all these deformities
from blood that had
clotted in the brain:
a stroke. So,
a malady
of the elderly became
his personal anomaly.
 
Blood soaked, crooked,
crying, and
brain damaged:
this was how we greeted
our son,
 
yet
from those bodily barricades
and
out of that
unquenchable panic
came
a boy who
did not interrupt a family,
did not join a family,
but who created a family.