The Curse of Miracles

The doctor jerked back
from Mother bound in stirrups;
nurses crossed themselves
when my son's huge head
first burst through his helmet
of an amniotic sac.

A thick sheen of fluid
washed across the tiles
as one nurse sucked in a breath
and gasped
"He's smiling..."

He flopped across the table
against the agonizing press of gravity,
his flailing limbs so wrinkled
he looked like an astronaut
in a spacesuit
three sizes too big.

Still, no one reached out to touch
my first born child.

He looked up at me, his Father,
through huge eyes glistening black,
his face as calm as a man
asleep in his own coffin
before lifting a dripping
arm to point at me.

I thought this gesture
was miracle enough...

Then came his curse,
hissed from the lips
of everyone but us Three,
a legend that haunts
him to this day with fears
about the evil seeds
of unnatural birth.

He rolled over, sat up,
and, with one quick push
of his stubby legs from the steel,
stood wobbling on his own two feet.

How like an astronaut he appeared,
his fat, gray umbilicus
still attached to Mother's womb,
his soul laid bare through the sockets,
like a spacewalker,
faceplate upraised,
brave enough to breathe vacuum.

Scott Speck
06/15/2003