After IVF Treatment Day Five

By Rasma Haidri

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Perhaps some part of me still believes
I will live on in my children’s children
and their children, still believes there will be children
solid as green glass, as dark and bright,
sturdy as bone grown from the liquid void
of hope, of want, and need. I mean
the need to love, which is not need at all
but the opposite. Whatever the opposite of need is,
I believe in that.

There is a sprig of lavender in a green glass bowl
on my white-painted window sill. I believe
in the fertile green of the clifftop trees
behind the bowl, outside my window. I believe
these things know each other, trees, bowl,
that both belong to the one solid world
I am passing through. They belong and will remain,
and one day a girl child will cup the bowl
in her two hands at the foot of those trees and
laugh, because something will be funny,
something will be a joy, the day will be green
and the girl, the girl will not know 
I saw her there. Already today I saw her
and the tiny womb deep in her belly. 

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Rasma Haidri is a South Asian Norwegian-American poet, the author of Blue Like Apples (Rebel Satori) and As If Anything Can Happen (Kelsay Books). Her writing has been widely anthologized and appeared in many journals including Rattle, Fourth Genre, Action Spectacle, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, and Phoebe. She lives with her wife on a Norwegian seacoast island. See rasma.org.

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