Metempsychosis

The strangest vistas manifest when we attend

To children who recall having lived lives before.

It is mundane, almost predicable, what they

Now claim: They had a nicer Mom the last time round,

A nicer house. Mere children now, they’d had a mate

They know by name and children older than they are.

They range from three to five in age when they give voice

To such outlandish matters—by five to seven

It’s all forgotten more or less as once again

The hurly-burly, diurnal stimulus of

Growth claims and enfolds them in the ranks of merely

Average, ho-hum, unremarkable humanity.

Most lives recalled ended abruptly, the person

Dying in violence or accidents—and young.

Only a few whom the Copernicus of Return,

Dr. Ian Stevenson, meticulously

Studied recalled the strange odd interval between—

Spent in a heavenly domain briefly or long.

Then came the time to be reborn again, an angel

Urging such a course, and one among the cases—

At his new birth a boy, who’d spent the interval

In heaven, as he recalled, beside a magic

Waterfall—wished to stay on and not be born at all.

The cases gathered? They are few. In many birthmarks

Show the injuries (stab wounds or bullet tracks) that

Still mark, in this new life, what had cut off the last.

At a glance the evidence suggests that rebirth

Is exceptional, not a rule for everyone—

A dispensation to provide some souls a second chance.