Some may call it
poetic license. I call it memories before birth and even before conception. More
and more people have publicly claimed similar memories. And now I suppose, so
do I.
As a child, I
often told my mother I remember being in her womb, and also when I was first
born. She told me I was only imagining it. But it goes back farther. I had
outlined in a previous post what I believe to be my immediate previous life to
this as a little girl who had died in a European avalanche. Perhaps after that
death, this is where my story begins.
I was in a
heavenly place among many “friends.” Day-after-day we coalesced almost as one.
The spirit of God was all around us. It was bright and puffy cloud-like and pillar-like,
just as in the Olympian stories. We sang in a high-tone sing/speech as if part
of a Greek chorus.
Finally, the
time arrived for me to go on my next mission. I was sad to leave them all, and
they were all around to bid me farewell. At that moment, I felt I was a feminine
spirit. I said something like, “Well, you know where I’m going. I may not be
back.” I spoke this in both a humorous tone but also with a deep
seriousness. They answered in Greek
chorus fashion all at the same time in a sing-speak, “Oh, you’ll be back.
You’ll be back.”
The next thing I
knew, I was hovering above electrical wires at the main intersection of my new
neighborhood in Chicago. It was night. The street lights were on. An electrical
power station lie kiddy-corner from the intersection halfway down the street. I
felt my entire body float horizontal in one of my incarnations previous to the
little girl avalanche victim incarnation. It was one as a full-grown male
scientist who had lived in Germany. It
was as if the little girl incarnation had been a short and sweet interlude
between lives. And now, I felt as if I were about to experience my first
incarnation in the United States.
In the distance
I could see my new house a few blocks away on a residential street. In the
bedroom were my future mother and father. I swooped down and, in a flash of
light, I was conceived.
As the months
within my mother’s womb transpired, I recall the bliss of floating in the warm amniotic
fluid and waiting. My favorite time was when my mother disrobed and a glowing
peach-colored light filled the womb. This beautiful light brought me such joy.
When my mother covered up again and all went dark, I was a little disappointed.
My mother had a
difficult labor with me, and doctors were afraid that either she or I would die
at the hospital. I was born with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, but
first around my shoulders. Fortunately, because of that, my air was not cut
off. I do not remember my birth per se,
but remember lying next to my mother in brilliant white sheets. The doctor came
in some time after the delivery and I remember him talking with my mother and
smiling down at me.
I knew where I
had just come from, but didn’t know where I was now. It was all so new and
unfamiliar. Nonetheless, I was quite happy.
The following is
a poem I wrote about my previous incarnation as a German scientist, which
appeared in my book of Chicago poems Swimmer’sPrayer:
The Immigrant
They found someone
to replace me
at the laboratory,
or was it the drafting table,
it’s hard now to
remember
exactly where I sat
pouring over
cryptic notes for
thirty years.
My wife prayed
every night
the first six
months after it happened,
and a gray angel
let me know
that all was well,
life continued for her and my children.
The wire-rimmed
young man with a stutter
who seemed
confounded by what I left
under the shop’s
dangling lamps
eventually
surpassed me.
In this half earth,
half death,
I hover at Harlem
and Higgins
over electrical and
telephone lines
which even one-up
what he accomplished,
and what we all
struggled for back then
in cold-connected
rooms that smelled
of vinegar and
burnt hair.
I always wanted to
come to America,
and who knows how
long it would
have taken the
conventional method,
the conversations
in telephone wires
just inches below
me are comforting,
And electrical
charges from nearby lines,
destined to
brighten a party
at a house a few
blocks away
from where I float,
do warm me,
but what I really
want
is not what man has
wrought,
so I wait, in the
chill, for the right moment.
After the party, in
the dark, a woman loves a man.
I draw closer, and
find I miss these earthly passions,
off and on and
uneven as rocky ledges.
I draw closer, and
fall in love with both of them,
and in turn,
unknowing in their delirium,
they invite me to
carry on the work they started,
and from this
woman’s womb,
I barely begin to understand a new century, a new city.
~ Cynthia Gallaher
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