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Thursday, May 3, 2012

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.

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