work in progress/ Sleeping Beauty Poem

sleeping's pills

snow fell covering all

spring I was three

no taller than papa's knee

sleep white pill's lullaby

cozening me

forget myself - hear - soft - hush

only you psychiatrist

who bade me sleep

in these white sanitized sheets

my inner eye is closing

I recall this

before I forget I am

I fell through the thin ice

when I was three

cracking apart under me

cold blue world swallowed me

fingers of ice

curved towards me, an almost love

then silence and warmth calm

drifting below

sweet my amnesiac pate

a doctor brought me back

on a table

through a tunnel of rimed rock

you now send me back there

the pond again

to slumber a hundred years

I trudge back to dying

to return home

it was always borrowed time

when a century dies

a chink of light

will open this wall of

impenetrable

night, hole

tunnel, birth canal to life

the seed of me is dormant

under the blue ice

Lucy Simpson

Seattle

3/28/2007