Two Poems by Thomas Saunders

To a Newborn

Your mother’s cry skewers
the heavy air as you arrive,

eyes wrenching open to
a world

of white-clad smiling strangers.
No wonder then that you try

the only note you possess,
a siren-wail

demanding the wet darkness that nests
inside your mother’s walls.

No one dares disturb your expanding universe except
the midwife, who in one swift move

cuts with force the only link you have left
to your mother, a link

less tenacious than the hair that clings
to your scalp or

the rust that adheres to scrap-heap cars. They lift
you up into your mother’s weary arms,

her light breaking through
the cold darkness of the limitless space

inside of you — but still you wail,
mourning for a lost world despite

being drowned by the depth
of your mother’s sobbing happiness.

The Womb Days

Realm of nourishing darkness, inner sanctum
where the foetal body lies curled like a question
posed to the deceive-dagger world.
We are shaped by what we carry.

Yet first being is reserved for the arrival
into wicked noise and bleary colour;
and the womb days fade into nothingness,
unremembered, forgotten like a chrysalis.

Thomas Saunders is a young poet from The United Kingdom. A member of the SKEGS Poetry Society Stanza, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Eunoia Review and Mindfork, and he has been longlisted for both the Christopher Tower Poetry Competition and the Kingfisher Poetry Prize.

Header art (“Womb”) by Azra Subasic.