This is for you and all our writers and readers who know words will call them home. The poem is unfinished and untitled, just like my relationship to my deceased marmi. It’s never too late to explore the all of our mamas:
I know how long
you have been waiting
to be loved,
the way a mother
holds their babies
who burst forth like nebula
from milky thighs
with hands like stars,
and toes like ten small planets
Rotating around the
earth of mother.
I have no easy remedy
If you weren’t loved enough,
but I know mother stories
were lived to be changed,
have been waiting for you
to tell a different story,
one that will hold you
and her
In that first cradle
of swath and hope
and infinite love.
To write that story,
first you have to be shattered.
You have to travel to far away lands
and hold a telegram in your hands.
A ship might bring you a letter
yellowed by the sun.
Words will finally call you home.
This is how the healing comes,
under the night sky on a rooftop
or in an open sea.
On your way home
you might remember
your mother’s hands,
the smell of her sweat or perfume.
The earth under her fingernails
and her breath that smells of cigarettes
or peppermint.
This is how you create a new story,
one where the best of her
is holding you,
still covered in blood and vernix.
Oh, mother –
your hands never smelled of onion,
just white out and carbon paper,
horse manure and ink.
The fragments of you
make the woman I am today.
You are in the face of every zinnia,
every ring of Saturn,
You are the darkest mystery
that shines above me.
I forever walk toward you
to make me whole.