MOTHER’S LIGHT GUIDES ME TO HER
I.
To her wound. I descend
into her balefire. Birth scraps
a scar on my neck.
I cleave to her, suckle loss.
As soon as I am born,
I start saying goodbye.
Nothing lasts. Except scars.
Love makes me her namesake,
her likeness in miniature,
her wound’s creation. My parents’
elixir. They raise their grail.
II.
When a baby’s born,
all mothers sigh in unison,
a butterfly effect,
rippling into all mothers’ souls
then to the planets and stars,
searching for names.
My grandmothers and great grandmothers
were generous with births.
Most had 6 or 7.
There were tragedies.
The two baby sisters Mom lost,
creating a hole in Grandmother Lilian’s soul
that mother could not fill.
The wound of the mother
becomes the wound of the daughter.
My mother felt abandoned
by her mother, just as her mother
felt abandoned by her baby daughters.
III.
Grief is a shared malady.
It drains the pond.
No amount of tears
can repair the hemorrhage.
Healing is not always glorious.
Though light guides and softens pain,
it can singe as a wildfire.
Creation of life and love
is as chaotic as star birth.
BEARING THE WORLD
Your equator is full.
I hold your globe and press my ear
against your skin to hear
the heartbeat of another new sun,
its glow flickering,
a mysterious creation
held in warm waters.
Soft waves lap to the tiny heartbeat.
Your water breaks and floods the home
with babies, diapers, pacifiers, toys.
I learn to swim to rescue you
from drowning
and think someday I too will
bear the world
and pack my chest of hopes
with bibs, blankies, bottles.
My dreams leave no sound as they settle
into shadows.
My ghosts, swaddled
in umbra.
ODE TO THE EMBRYO THAT MY T-SHAPED UTERUS MISCARRIED
You left my broken womb
as the bloody remains of what
was never to come. I still feel you
in the waves, the flow
of my sacral river - your tears?
Your fears I’ve abandoned you?
No, Honey. No! I’ll never forget you.
The t-shaped womb
couldn’t hold your brilliance.
Your tiny, beautiful self,
washed away. Your light
sparkles in each of my cells.
My core, your forever home.
Your essence, my creative labour
in verse and art.
Everyone says, “Forget the dead.”
I can’t leave my baby
screaming in her forever crib.
Or my young miss alone
in harm’s way on grief’s edge.
Though never delivered
into my arms, you shelter
in my wound of wanting. Each night,
I press my scar against a pillow
to swaddle you in your mother’s heat.
In dreams, we share the sacred skiff,
and together, wind up and up
out of the wake
of the wound
into a newborn sky.
Barbara Leonhard is the author of the best-selling Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir (EIF, 2022) and co-author with Nolcha Fox of Too Much Fun To Be Legal (Garden of Neuro, 2024). Both books are available on Amazon. Barbara has received nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the Editor of MasticadoresUSA. You can follow her on her Wordpress blog: Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver.
Prepared by Angela Kosta Executive Director of MIRIADE Magazine, Academic, journalist, writer, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, translator, promoter.
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