On the site of an old
injury, buried deep
under the closed skin
an itch begins,
an itch
the scratch of which
may yield a poem
or a theorem, or unearth
the seed of a great invention
that will unseat
all our assumptions
and rewind Time.
A small insistent itch
under a patch of newer skin
that doesn’t match—
something inside that wants
to birth, or hatch,
work its way out
from under a healing
that was incomplete.
So it can all begin
again, from scratch.
Robyn Sarah’s memoir, Music, Late and Soon appeared in 2021 Her collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2015. She lives in Montreal.
