An Ethiopian novel written in the sixties,

reads Aleweledim, and translates to "I refuse to be born".

I remember it as accurately as a face in a water appears,

correctly and incorrectly.

 

The fetus tells his destitute mother

a woman of the streets and no means,

“Why would he come into a world devoid of truth?

If any hand comes to grab me out of this womb,

I would retreat the way a knot tightens

when a brute yanks it.”

 

The fetus is curious and whimsical.

He asks his mother what she might feed him

if she had nothing to feed herself today.

And then he breaks into laughter

as if his mother is so foolish

she eats only to feed him and starve afterwards.

The fetus probes,

tell me mother, why should I leave this safe womb

to witness your worthlessness?

 

The mother is speechless and apolitical.

Her thoughts are forever spread

in his father's smell against street smoke

and a mist of alcohol sprayed into the night like a devil's perfume.

 

“Even if conceived you of air and dirty water,”

the mother tells the fetus,

“I am ready to push you out so you can be beside me

And aloneness dissolves for both of us.

My son, wouldn’t you wish to protect me

As I am protecting you now?”

 

The fetus laughs like clouds letting a rain loose.

The fetus is a dream that never is true for those who know

water before water, ocean before ocean,

and suffering before suffering.

The fetus refuses to come out.

He loves his mother and wants to sleep through the eternal nightmare.

 

I can’t blame the fetus, but I have questions.

 

Where there is a road, there is a horizon.

Where there is a horizon, there is an edge of a mountain.

Where there is an edge of a mountain, there is the Sun and the moon in arm's reach.

Where there is the Sun and the moon, there is the abode of God.

 

If God is there and the street is here,

Why is the fetus growing in the mother's womb

like a serpent curling in the flowers of Eden?

 

If life is destined to be lived

and grace starts with us in the beginning,

then why does a life forms in a mother's womb,

even though the sky, the air, the water, the earth all knows

neither life nor God himself

can love the creation?

 

I wonder,

What if life always turned away when it cannot become?

 

This not exactly how the novel unfolds,

but it is how I remember it.

The fetus has divorced his mother,

and now she must live with it.

 

March 2026

Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA

 

Cover art by Mylene2401 on Pixabay