(The Hunterian Museum: the Royal College of Surgeons of England)
I. Prevention of the Unborn
Beginnings with Mercury
sheep skin and silphium,
a match to
dismember
for lovemaking.
A woman’s body, handled
and torn, swollen from
birthing
wishing for rest and pleasure.
A child’s lips- milking
endearing,
but the cause of age,
as one splits into three.
II. Termination of the Unborn
The product of
otium lovemaking
and the investigations
of the intellectual
mind
Children never meant
to live.
One, encased in glass, now a
specimen, collected by
surgeons- a natural death,
a stillbirth, a miscarriage
(blamed on the mother,
thoughts wanton or chaste).
Another,
wrapped in the uterus,
swimming in a pool
of unwanted water,
methods of removal
then plunged into the
walls of tissue and
consumed, ripped, torn
-a method of birth control,
when not a remedy for
predicted death,
the taking of a life.
Buried into the ground,
or burnt to ash,
preserved in a jar.