The power of touch: Coordinates – a poem by Maria Popova

‘I watched the blood spill / its perfect pomegranate seeds / into the aluminium spaceship / of the kitchen sink ...’

Welcome to the Guardian’s Power of Touch series

I still wonder
why the knife was
in my left hand
when I pressed it into
the watermelon bark
blade-side up,
pressed it hard and slow
and felt it stop at my bone,
felt no pain at all
as it split my thumb
along a perfect meridian.
I watched the blood spill
its perfect pomegranate seeds
into the aluminium spaceship
of the kitchen sink.

I was six.
I was learning directions.
Left became encoded
in the scar.
Across this slice of spacetime,
this half a lifetime,
I still glide my index finger over it
in animal instinct
when asked to orient.

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born, US-based writer and critic.