Once You Go Through The Looking
-stephanie pope

Once you go through the looking and
    see with looking-glass eyes you
    see there are so many little ones to
    attend:
    some existences that never were but
    still are and prefer themselves this way
    unborn
    and some that will have been
    that never were before
    conceived
    yet life is pregnant for them

    Who can understand the
    language of forgotten eyes
    set against and apart let alone
    what tomorrow has to say
    if they were to echo their
    unspeakable today
    Don't worry!
    She understands how
    unspeakable she is and her yolk
    the  placenta of surrounding you
    in having been so choked

    You see, all that matters
    in all that mattering is
    really happening
    like inner down so let it
    out-grow the old surface crust
    with new in-sides  and so
    while it keeps working away in you
    keep chipping away at it
    till the fragments of your paltry skin
    split apart 
    and you are livable again

    The way new life hatches
    from it's old shell as bit by bit
    is the way of everything new
    that can't yet be yet is nesting
    like an ovum passing through
    passes from within
    and when it passes
    it passes  in two:
    into language and
    into the language
    of its many skins