“Most of Your Body is Younger Than You Are” *
Who is the you that is older than most of your body,
meaning its self-replacing cells, also, the microbes
outnumbering them?
Perhaps you are the shape taken, like a bent tree
seeking sunlight. Or like an eddy, now coiled,
now unspooling. Still called water, still
called river. Or like the crush of dahlias
my neighbor tends and snips in a slim strip of soil,
their roots multiplying each summer, tubers
she unearths, after the first hard frost, shelters
in her basement all winter, in the garden, come June.
This late October morning, Orange Jewel petals
stretch open like cupped palms, graze my face,
drawing laughter up the stalk of my body,
from the darkness where it took refuge
that winter the burl was sliced from the stem
of my spine. What is this current older than root,
brighter than blossom, unfurling in the sun?
* Ed Yong: “Neurons Could Outlive the Bodies That Contain Them”.
Lailah Dainin Shima walks and writes on the shores of Lake Wingra, in Madison, Wisconsin. She loves folding poems into envelopes she drops into mailboxes and forgets. Her poetry has also appeared on friends’ phone screens and various literary journals, and will be in the forthcoming anthology, The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy.
Header photo by Frohe Weihnachten, courtesy Pixabay.
