November
(2004)

Today is the day I was born
forty odd years ago at five pounds no ounces,
pregnant women were still allowed to smoke back then,
in the good old days. Fags were fags and no
one accused anyone of putting out a butt.
Not that it didn't happen.

I promised that it would be like just any other day,
but as usual that feeling envelopes me
as I wake to November Seventh Skies,
having just started re-reading Ted Hughes,
Birthday Letters for Sylvia, re-appreciating
the man's willingness to digress
on all that love meant to him,
in sentimental ways, not meaning to please
anyone, remembering Plath's rejection
at the hands of England in its Entirety.
As if I'd never read that book the first time.

What is it about this being born that matters
as you conjure up one of mother's old stories,
the time she saw The Light in her placenta previa,
the Voices told her:
"We aren't ready for you yet," and brother John
lived to be allergic to human milk and cow's milk,
the only answer a goat's teet before Similac.

And I had to be born. I definitely had to be born.

Now that John is an homeless addict and Mom is dead,
you wonder why she lived so that he could die
so many years in the future,
unrecognisable save for the knowledge that it really is him
casing my sister's house for a burglary.
It must have killed her as it kills me now.
He was born the November day six years before
JFK was shot and it always mattered
to us all in some familial way that we couldn't fathom
when we remembered it before it ever happened.

Oh November! Oh November here you are again
In the refrain, the afterbirth,
The light and the stain. November again.

....and on November 5th, I finally finished V for Vendetta. Now...there is a movie that ought to be watched. Once the movie started, it was only a moment or two until V mentions, the Fifth of November. And there it was! We were watching V for Vendetta on the Fifth of November.

It was a real Jimmy Judd moment.

http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/

And of course, there is always the Crowhaven moments of yore:

http://www.lastdriveinontheleft.com/crow-secret.html

Poor old Meg Porter.