Author: poetryfest

Today, a cloak of humankind you wear
Woven by hands of envy, celestial flair
Nature’s domains reflect your aura’s gleam
Leaves whisper secrets in a timeless dream

Logic’s dogma embraced with careful reason
In life’s symphony, shared threads in season
Celestial lineage, earthly claim combine
Realms interlaced where mortal and divine align

Claiming Earth’s lineage, a fleeting trace
Yet, resemblance echoes in life’s sweet embrace
Made human today, a journey intertwining
Divine threads in this earthly tapestry shining

Today, divinity and humanity interlace
A reflection in new design, masterminds in grace
No demigod’s vanity, just a wish to comprehend
Completeness you bring, my eternal friend

death is a shy thing
(he does not knock
just lingers
like a hush
between heartbeats)

he is not cruel—
only sure,
only the hand
that closes a book
(softly softly)

no hurry no fuss
just a step into light
or dark
(or neither)
& all the clocks
forget
our names.

but listen—
if you turn just right,
in the hush between rain & silence,
you will hear him breathing
(the way a candle
remembers fire
even when it is smoke).

There are many ways to kill infant girls, sometimes simply by refusing to hold them.
I developed allergies after my father died. Took me four years
to realize that
like a poisoned imprint, what remains of him is this, not
the embrace.

How in India, parents are not told the gender of their baby to eradicate female
infanticide, yet many are still abandoned in government cradles.

Once abandoned,
how do we unbroken ourselves into love?

My heart is a trap of
elaborate cravings,
enticing enough to draw in bugs,
yet insubstantial to be chosen,
a cadence of brokenness, its castoffs lying
on the floor like a collection of ebbing memories.

The erased faces from gender selection reveal parents who reject their girls, fathers who drown them, mothers who suffocate them, and entire families remain silent – a wrenching sorrow for abusive enduring traditions. The loud anguish of these girls silenced, as our coarse words fade into invisibility. The mother daughtering —a
whimsical denial of life.

women
mustn’t yell. If we love, let it be softly,
or else it’s too good to be true. If we grow older,
grow knowing love ends, because you might die before him.
If you make love, do it disinterested,
for if you find enjoyment, it ́s only to numb yourself – gods do not forgive a woman
who knows pleasure.

The abandoned babies are usually females. This aging unborn body—what makes it
unfit for lasting love? I, who loved a father, knowing I would end up alone, not even
dogs wanting to piss on my legs?

I start with the title,
driven by a greedy anger I ́ve learned to be ashamed of, but the truth is
I am enlarging grief, occupying
space like unending fields of mourning.
And moving slowly within the day,
a debris of gravitas – my personality the culprit,
unheld as if you wanted to kill a female baby in a cradle not of a mother’s making.

What is it about us, broken women, not made for long term?

After “Song for a Fifth Child (Babies Don’t Keep) by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton

Mother, oh mother, put down your burp cloth.
Donate the diapers, shut off the wash,
Pack all the hats for tiniest of heads,
Sew up your heart and collapse baby’s bed.
Where is the one whose absence is so shocking?
We’re all still here waiting with empty arms, rocking.

She’s gone without even a “Good night, Gorilla”
(Hush, little darling, now don’t say a word).
She left only a small, empty pillow
(Daddy’s gonna hold you, sweet little bird).
Your home’s a better one and there’s nothing to do
But leave room in our hearts where we thought you grew,
Where we’re praying, loving, most missing you.
(Our little Mercy, we’ll hold this as true:
Our Father in Heaven is holding you.)

Goodbye, the life we hoped you’d still have tomorrow.
Some kids don’t grow up, as we’ve learned to our sorrow.
Farewell, little future. Dreams, go to sleep.
We’re mourning our baby, one we can’t keep.

Runs through the veins of almost all.
A curdling poison of sorts,
Spewing, rolling, tumbling,
Off lips and stirring in hearts.
Hatred words causing pain and grief to all.
Like drugs,
Making innocent sweetness,
Die in the hands of those hatred demons.
Toxicity ruins lives,
Relationships,
And poisons the innocent’s angelic eyes.
Turning in the membrane,
Toxicity burning fuel
In their hearts of the keeper.
Until their curdling dark blood
Falls.

Letting go,
As if it’s just release.
You’ll have to
Peel it off my skin
Scrape out
my insides.
I mean
it’s probably cellular,
By now,
epigenetic.

Numbers I didn’t understand
Mercurial memory
The nested fear springing up
Unexpectedly

I resent my own familiarity
With hospital bureaucracy
The voice to take
With a nurse or doctor
technician or administrator.

And the window I finally cracked open
Slammed shut
And there i am
ill-made
To make it through
What they call simple
Natural
Simple
“A natural birth”
Not ravaging
Brutal
A wrecking chaos
Instead they call you ill-made
They risk stratify
They look at you sadly
“Poor guy” they say
To the sound-image

I cannot imagine how different your father would be,
Or if he would have met me,
or if you would have had addiction difficulties.
Or truly how God decides to make the call for miscarriages

I’m not mother material,
But I like to think I would’ve been,
If I could’ve met you
I never met your mother, but she didn’t meet your dad
Not the way I had, this man

I never had the privilege of meeting you
And I suppose It’s not my right to
When your dad couldn’t meet his son,
But I love him, and already love you.
And I’m sorry I won’t have the right to.

I wonder then, if your soul will show
In my own son, or hers, or some stranger’s
Or perhaps it exists as the five-year-old It should be,
in a world I’ll never know

So we pray for her, sometimes, and I wonder if that’s weird
Then wonder if she prays too, for your half-brothers, for you
Or if her husband kisses her tummy
Or misses you
The way I don’t have the right to.

I vowed to my father at his open grave
not to trust another
for others will leave me bleeding

I vowed to my father at his open grave
to lock my heart
for others will leave me bleeding

I vowed to my father at his open grave
to voice my truth
for others will leave me bleeding

I vowed to my father at his open grave
to help the voiceless
when others have left them bleeding

*

When Father died and I was seventeen
I knew he left me
abandoned deserted me
his child

Fifty years later I recognized
He didn’t leave me
he died
just like all beings do

I opened up to trust a teacher
started meditating daily
and achieved joy I never knew
delving into wisdom

I opened up to love my husband
giving him my heart knowing
he’ll stay with me
until his time has come

I opened up to see all colors
not just blacks and grays
vibrating with all beings
soaking up the now and now and now

there’s a difference between feeling death and feeling like death.

feeling death requires your lungs failing to inflate,
feeling death must mean your blood terminating
its circulation in your veins and arteries like a carousel.
feeling death is its old, clammy hands on your back
and its rancid breath fanning your cheek.

feeling like death is entirely different.
This is obvious to anyone with a brain.
feeling like death is having blood splattered on your shirt,
a white shirt, in the middle of nowhere,
and having that once clammy hand holding yours like a
parent does a child to cross the street.

feeling like death requires looking down at bodies as they squirm,
and scream, and beg you not to play god.

I can’t forget the little wound of you
I see the magnetic strip of it happening
On repeat in sodium lights of memory
In moments of taxing grief
That murder so minuscule
Haunts my thoughts.

But I saw it happen
In the night
In the rain
In the headlights of my car
And the oncoming truck that—
I watched it die.

I saw the small cat, little more than a kitten
Crossing the street
In the night,
in the rain,
In the lights of the oncoming truck that hit—
It broke me.

I watched it unzip before my eyes
Like some macabre magic trick
Its body opened like a purse
In the rainy night
In the headlights of my car.

It fell five feet in front of me
Fighting, shuddering, clawing at the air
With confusion, pain, desperation
And then

It stopped.

And there was just
The rain
And the night
And the headlights illuminating
The overwhelming silence cast in bronze.

And the night and the rain—
They never stopped.