O sweet spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous

 earth how often have

 the

 doting

           fingers of

 prurient philosophers pinched

 and

 poked

 thee

 ,has the naughty thumb

 of science prodded

 thy

       beauty      .how

 oftn have religions taken

 thee upon their scraggy knees

 squeezing and

 buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

 gods

         (but

 true

 to the incomparable

 couch of death thy

 rhythmic

 lover

           thou answerest

 them only with

                         spring) 

e.e. cummings

  

For some reason this poem was going through my head when I was shivering in the (astonishingly cold) operating theatre undergoing a c-section. I was in labour (unimaginable pain, waves of it), for minutes, hours (all day): the closest parallel which occurred to me at the time, in my drugged state,  was that I was being oppressed by an enormous ceiling fan beating ceaselessly overhead, Apocalypse-Now style, delivering layers of agony). Birth by c-section, the crucial part, takes 5 minutes; the longest part is being stitched up again. When the baby was removed, I could feel a strange stretching and tugging sensation. I think I must have been deliriously equating the poem with the reality: the doting fingers of prurient doctors pinched and poked me so I answered them only with Max.