Ignis Fatuus
The unborn sleeps on salient dreams:
It thinks it may…it thinks it might,
Come to term, embrace the light,
Waking in whole form
And becoming a person,
Standing in a square place
Like other walkers that carry the winds of life,
And smack the bottoms of its wrinkled feet
On the wellness of the earth.
In its wet half-dawn, the unborn sleeps on;
It pauses, time to time, to understand
A new huffed voicing of its mother,
Or reflex the tickle of another bubble in its left ear;
With each passing of hours of months
It floats in slalom with the disco gurgles
Of the red real rivers now pressed to its cheek;
And as it grows,
It joins in heart-to-heart tune
With its lub-thunder neighbor upstairs;
It mind-thinks forward in its waterworld,
Thinking it may and thinking it might
Prepare a speech and make it right,
But while it dreams
A hundred wants a minute,
About the unnumbered lifetimes it could ever be,
Someone dressed in harm-of-doing
—‘A Life Giver’--
Suddenly decides to put forth the hand
And interrupt a dream.
—Dumas fils