Light, light, so much light!
Suddenly, at the end of the slow process,
enormous brightness everywhere.
And everywhere became larger.
I didn't have words, and scarcely thought.
But I had perception. I perceived
bedazzlement and my body's reaction.
Now I would call it shock.
Noise, too, was everywhere, huge,
around and through me. I had, you see,
no sense of a separate self. I
was the everywhere, with no edges.
I began to distinguish voices.
"She," they kept repeating, and somehow
I knew that "She" was me. So began
the experience of limits.
In every direction, whiteness — which had
angles and corners. Heads and bodies
disappeared behind what I now see as walls;
but then I had no names, no concepts.
Movement was happening. Noses and chins,
cheeks and mouths and eyes, which I did not then
know or understand, moved close and away.
There was a sense of speed, of bustling.
And I felt myself moved (not fast, not a lot).
I was taken and wrapped, moved further from
a part of the everything, a dim lump
that I knew I needed — my exhausted mother.
And all the time, startled by light, I kept looking.
I began to experience my mind’s reaction too,
which now I identify as awakening
curiosity, even a beginning of wonder.
