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Edited on Tue Nov-04-08 05:16 PM by BlueIris
"The Abandoned Newborn"
When they found you, you were not breathing. It was ten degrees below freezing, and you were wrapped only in plastic. They lifted you up out of the litter basket, as one lifts a baby out of the crib after nap and they unswaddled you from the Sloan's shopping bag. As far as you were concerned it was all over, you were feeling nothing, everything had stopped some time ago, and they bent you over and forced the short knife-blade of breath back down into your chest, over and over until you began to feel the pain of life again. They took you from silence and darkness right back through birth, the gasping, the bright lights, they achieved their miracle: on the second day of the new year they brought you back to being a boy whose parents left him in a garbage can, and everyone in the Emergency Room wept to see your very small body moving again. I saw you on the news, the discs of the electrocardiagram blazing like medals on your body, you hair thick and ruffled as the head of a weed, your large, intelligent forehead dully glowing in the hospital TV light, your mouth pushed out as if you are angry, and something on your upper lip, a dried glaze from your nose, and I thought how you are the most American baby, child of all of us through your very American parents, and through the two young medics, Lee Merklin and Frank Jennings, who brought you around and gave you their names, forced you to resume the hard American task you had laid down so young, and though I see the broken glass on your path, the shit, the statistics—you will be a man who wraps his child in plastic and leaves it in the trash—I see the light too as you saw it forced a second time in silver ice between your lids, I am full of joy to see your new face among us, Lee Frank Merklin Jennings I am standing here in dumb American praise for your life.
—Sharon Olds
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