Playmates

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Your love is all children of the world:
skipping gaily across my heart,
runaways from Forever, Everafter and
ironic plurals of the two;
a cracked dam
insolently spouts poetry and
covered in mud, some tattered poets.
Your love is

  all children of the world.

         Mine is a test-tube baby:
started faithfully with the recipe
then ruthlessly abandoned raw
a little not right, a little not mine,
gasping for imminent life;
a sunken void stands
filled to the brim
its surface taut:
Salient, silted,
silent.

Your love is all children of the world –
all children that cannot be yours –
you trapped like fireflies in a jar.
Mine is a test-tube baby
that surely can only be mine,
also imprisoned against bowed glass.

Tell me now, bluntly,
which one is born of pain
and which of pure chance?

Artwork by Mohsin Shafi titled “Heaven hidden from our eyes”