After delivery of the placenta, skin to skin for 30 minutes (regardless of feeding method)

The copperplate hand of my twenty-three-year-old self

Studiously documenting labour

A recipe to follow with times, weights, measures

Apgar score assessed at 1 and 5 minutes

Our reality so different;

You lifted out by another's hands, placed in perspex breathless and blue.

You clothed in bespoke ventilator cap

knitted by creased hands and kind hearts.

Your life force delivered through pumps and plastic.

The placenta should be delivered within 1 hour

Me unconscious, delirious, trapped by medicine's shackles

Spilt cells circling back into my veins

An ache in my heart so visceral it holds me down

Weighted to this bed.

My body whole

only a new scar to carry

perpetual reminder of this night's promise.

My hope that pooled on floors, stairs and clothing

Now lives, breathes and is.