There was always an unspoken assertion
that there was time before this,
before my time. Ninety six. A few billion years
in fact, before this. I knew about Jesus
and world wars but had always assumed
my parents had evolved from dust
to just be
thirty-something. Spontaneously
erupting from nothing the day I was born, carrying
on as normal three lives and my brother's,
that until then had never existed. Like ninety
six was the beginning of it all and all history.
It never occurred to me
or became any afterthought that mine
was just another life on a timeline.
That my mother would be ashamed to have once been
a Stalinist. Or that my father would have lifted
women and children over a cemetery wall
during an IRA funeral in Belfast under fire.