Neither light nor dark, flesh nor fleshless;
Captured in stillness, yet neither arrested nor mobile,
By a dim light streaming down upon the subject.
The form is endowed with lucid stillness,
As the pinprick leisurely surveys her exposure.
The long gestation;
A pre-life that only the camera knows.

Safe in the dark womb, plunged in amniotic fluids,
Reduced to image, a veil of paper
Chemicals fail it now.
The image’s beginning is its end,
A confusion of life and death
Perishing from the moment it is borne out into the light,
Caught in limitation somewhere betwixt un-being and being.