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AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS & WRITERS FOR PEACE
Life by Maggie Ball

[Above] Photo of Maggie Ball by photographer unknown, 1987.

Maggie Ball


Life

When does life begin?
At the point of softening
a woman imagining
the future
or that moment of meiosis
daughter nuclei
dividing and redividing
or long before
the permanent strands of DNA forming in
the first man
holding the potential of an
entire race in its twisted threads
mysteriously spiralling
somewhere in the universe
or later, much later
the first hit of pain
the delivery room scream
eyes meeting in recognition?

It is impossible to talk of love
and peace
of joining hands
and treating impersonal humanity
with care
without reaching out a hand
and stroking
the impossible softness
of my child's cheek
the terror and joy
the goes along with
the preciousness
of every breath
every blink of an eye
every life.

About the Poet Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball has been writing professionally for over 20 years. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from CCNY (New York) with a BA in English Literature. She also studied English literature and business at a postgraduate level at Oxford University in the UK and Charles Sturt University in Australia and has an MBA. A wordsmith of all-trades, her publication credits span short stories and flash fiction in magazines like Mocha Memoirs, For Me, fiction.4-writers, Long Story Short, and Einkwell; poetry in literary journals like Harpweaver, Artemis, and many printed anthologies; reviews and interviews in journals like Imago, Coppertales, and Midwest Book Reviews; essays, writing, health and parenting articles in journals as diverse as Performance Poetry, Scriptorium, Inscriptions, Aribella, Parents, and Box Planet. She is the author of The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything, and The Literary Lunch: Recipes For a Hungry Mind, staff writer at E2K, Editor-In-Chief of The Compulsive Reader and Preschool Entertainment web sites, is a manuscript assessor for Catchfire Press, a small publishing house, does technical writing and information management for Orica, a large multinational corporation, is mother to three young children, and is working on her first novel--not always in that order!
   [Above] Photo of Maggie Ball by photographer unknown, 1987.

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