Posts Tagged ‘motherhood’
monsters
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
image: Virgin and Child with the Milk Soup, Gerard David
poem: planetarium, adrienne rich
and something i missed: her obituary
update
I am still here. Mothering, tending, reminding myself to savor this brief moment, this fragile window of need. She requires the most and is near me at all times. Meanwhile, the girls continue to adjust. We are getting used to the chaos – the circus we bring on public outings. 3+ has an element of taboo. I pull from Love’s patience, Ami’s maternalness, little M’s humor, and her need for me. This is who i am during maternity leave, during a period when I stepped into 37.
My old shell heals and morphs back into shape. I squeeze into my old clothes and snap the waist button. They fit. It’s the mother’s milk…and the holding, bouncing, and swaying to music that comforts her. She cries a lot when she’s not in my arms.
We have hens now, free ranging in the backyard. They named my hen, a young plymouth rock, heño peño.
The rose bush bloomed.
It rained yesterday.
We’re nearing the next chapter.
I will return to work soon, and she’ll be placed in Love’s hands.
The girls will teach her the way of the she-tribe. He will teach her the ABCs.
When she calls for me, I will be far away. The milk will drop like tiny white tear drops.
The heart, the breasts, they remember this, all of this.
image: here
(pictures of her coming soon.)
her swan
“There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we.”
― Ina May Gaskin
Image: Joseph Beuys, ‘Schwangere und Schwan (Pregnant Woman with Swan)’ 1959
the imperious wind
for a time, I rest
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community
— image: here
its burden and greatness
My only advice for you is this. Go within yourself and probe the depths from which your life springs, and there at its source you’ll find the answer to the question of whether you must write. Accept this answer, just as you hear it, without hesitation. It may be revealed that you are called to be an artist. Then take this lot upon you, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without asking for any external reward. For the creative artist must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself—and in nature, to which he is devoted.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Painting: the sphinx by Helene Knoop
be like the bear
Be like a bear in the forest of yourself.
Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath.
Every hair has life
and standing, as you do, swaying
from one foot to the other
all the forest stands with you.
Each minute sound, one after another,
is distinct in your ear. Here
in the blur of mixed sensations, you can
feel the crisp outline of being, particulate.
Great as you are, huge as you are and
growling like the deepest drum,
the continual vibration that makes music
what it is,
not some light stone skipped on the surface of things,
you travel below
sounding the depths where only the dauntless go.
Be like the bear and
do not forget
how you rounded your
massive shape over the just ripened
berry which burst
in your mouth that moment
how you rolled in
the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling
with your sensate skin,
how you shut
your eyes and swam far and farther
still, starlight
shaping itself to your body,
starship rocking the grand, slow waves
under the white trees, in the
snowy night.
playing dead
the girls have a new game they play outside -
one lies down on the ground, face up, eyes closed,
dead grass knotted in her hair.
one sister comes to the rescue,
placing the dead sister in the little red wagon
and carting her to the gazebo, which is really the hospital.
The sister pulling the red wagon is really a doctor
who saves the other sister
with concoctions of dead leaves, berries, and dirt,
which they call medicine.
the father leaves the door open while he works,
listening as the sisters play.
meanwhile, the contractions become
more intense, and the mother
makes a batch of homemade granola
for the nest.
… only a few more weeks,
dearest friends.
illustration from the dead bird by margaret wise brown
the baby kicks
And then it was over, this world we had grown to love
for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses
and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities
while dreaming.
But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies
who needed milk and comforting, and someone
picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble
and began to sing about the light flutter
the kick beneath the skin of the earth
we felt there, beneath us
a warm animal
a song being born between the legs of her;
a poem.
image via old lawrence
joy harjo poem: when the world ended as we knew it
i hold your hand,
first born.
this is how you know
i’ve memorized
the length of your fingers. and when
you’re biting your nails again.
she held my hand, too,
bending my fingers upward
at the knuckles.
Perhaps, she thought,
i would be a dancer
instead of the sparrow
that, one day, would flee
her nest.
image: here
