Grasping

I was leafing through some back issues of The Sun magazine looking for prose poems - for I am sure I have read prose poems in The Sun - to read for this week's Poetry Thursday, and I found a poem in the Septmber 2006 issue by Stuart Kestenbaum. It's called Litany, and you can read it here, and it ends like this:

"Bless each cell, which is its own universe, ready to divide, split in two, and make more than enough."

I napped again yesterday, and again today, and I remember that I never had a minute's morning sickness with Small Boy. The only time during that entire pregnancy I threw up was when I came down with stomach flu at 34 weeks and then I threw up so much that it triggered contractions and I spent several days in the hospital hoping not to have a baby just yet. But I did sleep. Lord did I sleep. I slept in bed, I slept on the couch, I fell asleep on the train. I slept so much that one friend of mine actually thought I had spent the month of June in the States. I slept through much of July as well, drifting off in the afternoons with the Tour de France humming in the background, slept while Lance Armstrong brought L'Alpe d'Huez to its knees. I slept through the entire first trimester, slept fourteen, sixteen hours a day.

Three naps in three days is meaningless; I'm napping during the day because I'm not sleeping at night, because Small Boy has been sick and sleeping in our bed or waking early or both, because I'm sick and worn down, because the beans in the coffee machine are decaf and oh! let us bless caffeine. Three naps in three days is meaningless, but let me grasp this straw.

And bless each cell.