Dear Dolly
.
Unicellular, the smallest you could ever be, plucked from a gland
and dropped inside a test tube. How clear the walls of that first
universe, waiting for God or at least some kind of interventionist
garbed in a lab coat, there to transfer you from your singularity
into an ovum – ‘the miracle of life’. And when you finally emerged,
woolen–spooled and white–faced, did you expect any of this?
To be debated, derided, the poster child for man’s ego run amok
your face on a Time magazine cover, your name meaning ‘heavenly
gift’ – did this ever get to feel like a life? Barned in an institution,
lambed and reared in a simulacrum of fields and flock. In the end,
you got a half–life, before the years seized your joints, time running
faster for you than your sisters and brothers; before your lungs
clogged with tumours, your chest luminescent, a constellation scanned
on the veterinary bed where you lay – hooves to the sky. And when
they upped your dose of anaesthetic, from lucid haze to euthanasia,
it was almost a mercy, just a long sleep from which you never awoke
had they not stuffed your body, shoving it inside a glass container,
a four by four world, spinning and spinning under museum lights
like a crueller Damien Hirst. Now, I behold your immortalised glory
as you swivel on your plinth, surrounded by dynamos and gadgets –
those metal leviathans of Advance. You, Dolly, with your heart
and flesh, your desires gambolling light as a cloud. If I could,
I would smash the panes of your coffin, tuck your coarse curls
beneath my arms. Show you meadows, rapeseed – the stars.
.
.
Image details: Five Studies of the Head of a Sheep, Jacob van der Does, Rijksmuseum
Jasmine Gibbs is a poet from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Her work appears in Ambient Receiver, And Other Poems, Gutter and Outcrop. She is working towards a collection of coastal ecopoetry.
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