70: mother

I keep trying to write poetry but I've lost the rhythm I unearthed in adolescence.

Buried. Beneath what: saltwater, asphalt, dead skin? I

filled notebooks with inkstorms and pronounced it good. The small

god

of my smaller orbit.

All my delusions of deity have crumbled and I lay prostrate at my 

own weary feet. 

I'm thinking about all of the tears our mothers have shed,

and why,

and where.

Why pain resides so deeply where it has already found its rawest root. The womb

opens and expels and closes again, a breathing chrysalis,

mutilated into a denser beauty. A

harder beauty. 

I do not know what the weakness is  

that we are not allowed, that

crawls in the marrow of our screams,  flays the warm skin of our palms.

and we heal and heal and heal and heal

 because when we bleed

our children bleed -- 

I am trying to get my rhythm back, I am trying to hear everything my mother told me 

when I was seventeen

when I was a small god, with an unblemished womb

and no pain