In honor of Memorial Day, I’m remembering my identical twin sister Martha, who died several days after we were born. 

Twins born a month premature had little chance of survival in 1962, a time before medical science knew how to save the tiniest of infants.  I weighed just over 3 pounds, Marty just over 2.  The doctors promised my parents neither of us would survive, but it seems even then I was determined to beat the odds.

This poem is written in the voice of my sister, who describes our experience in the womb:  the veins lining the inside of the placenta we shared, her efforts to recite poetry about our time together , the fact that I was growing more quickly than she.

Hope you appreciate this poem about a primal kind of bonding and the profound sadness of losing someone whose DNA was identical to mine, someone who mirrored me even before the beginning, when “I” was “we” and “we” were wombed as one.

 

 To my twin sister who lived to tell about it

 

The room, which was poorly lit

     and warmer than we wanted,

     curved around us

               like planetarium

                    ceiling

               like the rind

                    of cantaloupe

                    as seen from the inside

 

I remember how you traced

     the networking of veins

     with the stub that became

                  the index finger

                  of your left hand

              

While I recited garbled

     poems about

           the splitting

                  of space

          the fact that you were

                 gathering more

                 matter