The News

My daughter called carrying spring in her mouth.

One sentence,
and the world split open like a ripe pomegranate,
its jeweled heart spilling across the kitchen table.

A child…

A child…

The word fluttered inside my ribs
like a trapped goldfinch.

I saw her at once,
twenty-three and luminous,
still carrying traces of the little girl
who slept with stuffed animals
lined along the bed like saints.

The little peanut.

My little peanut.

How strange that the body remembers
what time denies.

I can still feel the weight of her
sleeping against my shoulder,
her warm milk breath,
her small hand curled around my finger
like a pale vine.

And now another hand is forming
inside her.

Another heartbeat
stitching itself together
beneath her own.

The moon is old at this work.

The earth is old at this work.

Women have been opening their bodies
for centuries,
passing the flame,
passing the wound,
passing the impossible miracle
from one trembling hand to the next.

Yet my heart rebels.

It wants her back.

It wants scraped knees
and crooked braids,
the pink bicycle,
the nightlight glowing
like a small captive star.

It wants the child.

But life is a thief
and a giver in the same breath.

It steals the daughter
and returns the mother.

Twenty-three.

Such a tender age
to carry eternity beneath your ribs.

I grieve for the girl she was.
I celebrate the woman she has become.

Both things are true.

Both things sit together
inside me
like two birds sharing one nest.

And somewhere beyond us,
beyond blood and bone and memory,

a new soul waits…

small as a seed,
bright as a match flame,

ready to enter
this beautiful, terrible world.

The wheel turns.

And keeps turning.

And suddenly I understand
why trees keep making blossoms
even after winter.

© Wildwood Writer