In a day impregnated by night, in a timeless past
a storm slowly forms – a storm that has always been there.
An ageless woman.
Ageless? She is the age of Motherhood.
(She’s not as young as she once was.)
She has given everything to being a mother.
She loves her son, as she should.
She has unlearned hatred, as she would.
She’s pure, she’s selfless. She has unlearned the self (herself) the best she could.
She has done as she was supposed to – and we will all perish for it because she should never have been able to,
but nonetheless, she has done as she was supposed to do.
She has created the vacant space in her body, hollowed herself from inside out to allow room for the Child to grow.
And now the Child dissolves.
It pours down, waters down, into white foam. No matter the head resting on her chest, no matter the white milk now dry inside her breasts, no matter the lullabies sung for three decades three and echoing forever.
It dissolves.
She attempts to collect, to hold it, but it runs through her fingers, damps her clothes.
She cries an inhuman wallow
– doesn’t realize her tears strengthen the current and only help the dissolution.
And now there’s no more Child left to have and no more Child left to hold and not even a body to lay in her arms – even the body to grieve, she’s denied. And she lays on the ground and the once-child water soaks her until she can feel the cold inside her – where he once was –, until she can feel it inside her bones, until it embraces her. (Her own Mother did too, she doesn’t recall it.)
She places her face into the water, into this puddle of wasted love and devotion. If she is attempting to drink it or drown herself, it’s unclear
– either way, it’s too shallow.
So she cries. She cries the cry only the Mother who has lost her Son could cry.
She cries to no use and no salvation, she cries to no depthening of the puddle,
she cries to no God:
there’s no drowning from inside out.
No one comes to her rescue.
(There is no rescue.)
And so she screams.
She screams; and hatred, long forgotten – long forbidden –, finds itself to be at home in her lungs. Finds itself to be a sister, to be a daughter.
Finds itself bringing her palms and her knuckles to the barren rock and stone – hardened but not more than her –,
and maybe her blood, maybe her blood boiling out of her skin, trickling along the lines of time, pouring down with each strike,
shall birth back life to this place and restore fertility
to this wasted,
damned earth.
She wedges her fingers into the cracks and takes hold of the world.
Splits the ground open,
forces it to swallow her.
O
n
c
e
i
t
’s
a
l
l
o
v
e
r
a
n
d
t
h
e
r
e
’s
n
o
w
o
m
a
n
l
e
f
t
t
o
c
r
y,
it’ll be the rain who will have to cry
the loss of her in her place.