They say now that a healthy heartbeat
is always irregular, a changing pattern
of single events whose fragile rhythm
affirms response to our moments of knowledge.
I could compute the universal sum of heartbeats
but to know them as I knew our unborn children’s
their mountains and valleys on the ultrasound screen
and pulsing within, both me and other.
It’s hard to acknowledge your presence and share
though I’ve felt your heart as close as my own
though you set my pace and the climate I live with;
sky-clearer today, changeable as Mercury
who is also Hermes, god of movement
eloquent, tricky, patron of commerce
and under an older aspect, three times the greatest
Hermes Trismegistos, the poet’s god.
This poem is published in Kathleen McPhilemy’s collection A Tented Peace (Katabasis, London 1995) and reprinted here by kind permission of the author.