I wish we could have rewound time and been other people. We could have been strangers having a drink in an airport bar, formed a friendship that lasted through relationships and kids. We could have been neighborhood kids who grew up together, suffered through parental rules and high school. Or maybe, just neighbors who watched out for each other, swapping stories and checking in while bringing in trash bins.
At the very least, perhaps we could have pretended to be other people for a time, for a week or two— erasing past foot prints, created new ones in some distant soil. All the while, we could have worn different faces. You could have chosen the mother’s face you’d have liked to have worn. And I could have chosen a daughter’s face that perhaps wasn’t some reminder of what you wanted to forget or ignore.
If we could have worn different faces, made new footprints in different places-- Perhaps our burdens of rage and loss and fear would have drifted away like runaway balloons at a child’s birthday party long before that day in July that haunts me still when I had to reach down to close your frightened eyes.
My daughter, mine,
though you live
thousands of miles away
sleep safe, my daughter mine.
Though you live
where a man caresses a weapon of war as he plots
to drill death into hundreds as he walks down a street,
sleep safe, my daughter mine.
Though you live
where freedom should ring
yet a state ties you hostage in righteous ropes of religion,
sleep safe, my daughter mine.
Though you live
where you must sell your body
to feed your children,
sleep safe, my daughter mine.
Though you live
where no one, no law will protect you
from the monster who sleeps beside you,
sleep safe, my daughter mine.
Though you live
where you have no voice,
where you die in the custody of morality police,
where you can disappear with no outcry to echo behind,
sleep, sleep safe, my daughter mine.
Motherhood erased
The caesarean scar, the only trace,
A testament to what once was,
It holds a degree of lingering numbness
After these twenty years:
Nerves that cannot reconnect
To a self without motherhood.
Yes, a touch of numbness
As the child with her mother’s face
Turns away, rejecting the truth teller,
Rejecting the baptism of love, of name, of tears.
Let the child walk away.
Perhaps in losing her way,
She will find the path back,
A way to recognize being found
In the reflection of her own face.
Spun out from the centrifuge
Twisted in helix meaning
Strands entwined, twisted back
Stretching toward history within heritage
Search through the montage of time
Sift through pounds of truth and lies
For a few ounces of purity
Measured out within the mess
The now was the past
Where to walk
We travel back
On twisted helix roads
To the selves we were
So very long ago
And learn
The future braided
In the past
With the now
And made us whole
Rend the earth again
Tear, rip through miles of rock and soil
Till the swollen, rounded,
core lies exposed
Bubbling, glowing,
Sputtering out
Reaching tendrils of itself.
Note the flow,
Time the pulses of heat,
Beating with undulating life seen and unseen.
Then watch the viscous liquid cool,
Solidifying against the pain
Of each cold breath you expel
Stilling the beat of life.
The transformation to cold, hard stone
Within the earth’s crust
As thus,
A mother’s heart,
Torn open once too often,
Stops.
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