Remembering

Going back to my previous post with the link to Erin's site, I am spending this evening remembering.



Miscarriage Aftermath

The midnight air
vibrates electric,
as tense as the moment
before lightning strikes.
A leaden sky oozes
sulfuric blue sorrow
in fiery rivulets
of salacious, thick sweat .

Wake me,
shake me,
make me breathe again.

You pace these twisted halls,
anxious, caged,
yet singing softly
beneath deep sighs.
A honey-latin lyric
that sticky-drips
and slides—
warm into my untied ear

Calm the bee-buzz in my mind.
(You know the song I need to hear.)

Touch me,
hold me,
teach me your narcoleptic trick.

I cannot sleep
beneath these blankets;
cloaked and tainted
by the blood of bastard children
we’ve created, but never held.

A miracle denied,
deemed unworthy,
by selfish and unsharing Gods.

I lie awake,
count ceiling tiles and wait,
for the purple-pink of mourning to arrive.



and this one...


For My Husband, On Father’s Day


I often think
about her tiny fingers
that might have found
comfort wrapped around yours,
a picture of contrasts
so intimate
that these clumsy words
would seem a sacrilege.

You think about it, too.
It's in the phantom
way you touch my hair
in the quiet hours before dawn.
Her's might have felt that way,
nestled in ringlets,
halo-framing her cherub face.

I tell myself that
on this day, she
would have awakened you,
with her strawberry smile,
so much your own:

Like the sun's light
reflecting from the moon.

And somewhere inside
that radiant glow you
would have discovered your worth.



This is all I have left of the child we never held. No headstone to mark the place where she lay, no tiny strand of hair clipped gingerly from her still head. Just these words, and the silence of a pain so great it cannot be spoken.

I know that there are so many who have suffered harder losses than I, but all the same, a loss is a loss, and it deserves to be remembered.