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First Memory
by Irene Hossack
Looking down on my bowl of Campbell's
lentil soup,
I am struck like a blow with a thought, the thought
that cannot be properly thought, yet it is my first.
I am seven years old, seated at the family dinner
table,
I am here, and I don't know how I came to be,
or what it is that consists in being this child,
this me, staring at a bowl of lentil soup.
Perhaps the origin of things holds the answer:
liquefied vegetables, once singularly growing in
soil,
grown from seed sown by a farmer in the countryside
far from here-
unable to go beyond the seed, to know it before -
I begin again with the bowl.
Bought from a local department store, bought from
a potter, who created and painted and made it from
clay,
molded from beginnings as earth and water in an
artist's hands-
I am stuck at the clay and the paint and the
potter's mind -
the seed, the clay and me thinking
about how we came to be here, me thinking
the capacity I have to think towards the
impossibility
of ever getting beyond the thought that is myself.
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