Where the Not-Yet-Born Go

Lyrics

A waterproof pouch.
Sealed with wax against the pressure.
Inside, a name that was never called.
Lucy. Landlocked Lucy.

She wears the tail in the Florida springs.
Silicone scales catch the underwater light.
For the tourists, she is something not quite real.
Smiling through the glass, holding her breath for the cameras.
But her heart, she wrote, was always on the shore.
A creature of air, dreaming of solid ground.
The water was just a job.
A place to hide.

And she gave you to the deepest place she knew.
Past the sunlit zone, past the twilight.
Where the pressure would crush a lung, a hope, a memory.
The abyssal plain, that never saw a ship.
She asks the dark, the cold, the final quiet.
Where do the not-yet-born go?

Here is the photo. A galaxy in miniature.
A flicker on a screen from February.
And here, a single blue sock, knitted for a foot that never kicked.
A hospital bracelet with no name, just a number.
She carried this weight farther than any boat.
Let it fall from her hands into the Indian Ocean.
An offering to the one place
no one would ever look.

And she gave you to the deepest place she knew.
Past the sunlit zone, past the twilight.
Where the pressure would crush a lung, a hope, a memory.
The abyssal plain, that never saw a ship.
She asks the dark, the cold, the final quiet.
Where do the not-yet-born go?

Every day she sinks into the cool spring water.
A performance of drowning, a performance of grace.
Is this how it feels? To be held by something so vast
it has no memory of you?
To be a secret kept by the bottom of the world?
A lullaby sung in a key too low to hear.

The pouch settles on the silt.
Four degrees Celsius.
Undisturbed for a thousand years.
A question mark, resting in the dark.
Where do they go?