Little Sharp Shooting Star

You pierced me as you grew.

(I wanted you to grow.)

It killed you. Like a bumblebee.

Sharp shooters at life… We all are.

.

You died. I came to collect you.

(Baby mine. No more, no less.)

I turned you to gold.

You made me the alchemist.

.

People like me know dusk, too.

Those who truly look can see it.

Burned at the back of each retina.

.

You were just light.

Shone for some weeks.

Then gone.

.

A Christlike age to die, they told me.

With tubes, with pumps, paraphernalia…

I got dragged back.

I am later-dust, they said.

Go back… Make do.

.

I am the garden that eats itself.

So says the scar above your bed.

Injustice to me, injustice to us.

.

Oh Mother Nature…

Santísima Muerte.

Most Holy Death.

Here’s what you can’t know:

My star sleeps (perfect) on my skin.

Lives through me.

And I am she.

-

Louise I. Baker

-

Note: In October 2020, mid-second London lockdown, aged 33 and the mother of a fifteen month-old baby girl, I threw up then collapsed, unconscious, in my bathroom.

I had called paramedics the week before with extreme abdominal pain. We had decided together then I was not quite sick enough for the emergency room (not in Covid Prime Time).

My husband called the ambulance this second time. At St Thomas’s Hospital I was quickly found to be nine weeks pregnant. The pregnancy was in the wrong place and had ruptured. The bleeding was so extensive no-one could tell me where the baby had been growing.

I lost almost two litres of blood, had an abdominal washout, had a blood transfusion. Went home after a few days. I bought my shooting star pendant in the days that followed and have only ever taken it off for an MRI, once.

When my next pregnancies failed as well, I was at least given some reasons: adenomyosis, endometriosis, fibroids normally seen in women twenty years older than I, and Hashimoto’s disease, whereby my immune system was destroying my thyroid (and probably attacking any embryonic cells I was growing, as well). My thyroid and its large nodules were removed two years ago.

I can never stop writing about any of this.