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