Mother

Who then streams from the womb unbroken:
that first act — cutting — the bifurcation
of mother and child. And who is not chided
in separation, in wandering motherless,
orphaned to a world that drags annihilation
like a blue blanket behind her: wraps you
when you wail, smothers you in your own
sweet and imminent heat. And if we return
to the untenanted rooms of our youth, what then —
chances are the locks are changed, as if
we ever jangled the keys. And how many
spools of brittle wire have snapped
along the way, now mute though sparked
on the pavement of our loves. And so we may,
must, if despised by the amniotic sac of our lives,
cling to some hard and permanent thing: that tree,
that sorrow, that stone, that death that peals
as all the bells of succor and woe. Mother,
this passage entire is not wholly whole,
this birth strung out over the breadth
of a page or a life is neither intrepid nor gleaned
from the bangles that litter the skull. No.
It is simply this. Who then is not born blind
and harnessed to a string whose knots, though
randomly tied, must lead back to its own
ravelled and proximite end?

Image: Grant Whitty on Unsplash