Rebekah’s Ultrasound

Jacob and Esau struggled in the womb
right from the start. Rebekah’s ultrasound,
quite early on, revealed the embryos:
yin and yang, two fat big-headed commas
grappled together head to toe;
Rebekah only twenty weeks along,
they were duking it out in there already.

The sonogram was the usual fuzzy mess.
Chaos roiled the screen—the babies
sent the amniotic waters heaving
(if this were a satellite feed, we’d see
the Doppler radar of a cyclone forming).
But the cloudy image pixels couldn’t tell Rebekah
whether Jacob or Esau was coming first.

But a cyclone comes with wind and rain together.
With Jacob and Esau, there’s no and—it’s or.

—Deborah Warren