Birthed Through An Old Pain
Birthed through an old pain, we sprung,
To a living word on a mother’s tongue,
Saying, ‘My baby!’ Nurtured by brave love,
It kept calling until an umbilical root thereof
Took hold, a bone stem mineralized spinous,
And a heart tipping out to a leaf’s likeness
Green with ardent life and always
With the hazardous hope of it awake;
For it scathes, blotches, dents a heart in its punches
To a sallow leaf or a newly grieved mother grudges
Whose child’s bones hollow out marrow unsentimental
And in place, burrowing worms and loam settle.
Still, never askew motherly instincts and unbetrayed,
Hacks an angel out of the shriven flesh and decay
By cloaking and haloing her child’s name in tandem
With, ‘My darling!’ Blear-eyed and branded
From the flame of wounds, again, she attaches
The child to heaven after a life of cherishing passes
And is smoked by a firing gun to a fragment
By a skulking system wrought in absent
Of a philosopher’s burnishing eye, never cleaner,
And performed on the expansive arena
Of global media in all its forms, venting,
While most are midden and dour rending
To the mother’s grief which then takes up
The sun’s falling pitch, seen struck
But not heard amid the private gabbles borne.
The world curves into itself with little concern.
