by jeanne rené
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| photo jeanne rené |
Monotonous rows walked.
Stench rising to shields of handkerchief,
she searches for the smell of perfumed soap
on his ash covered neck
I inhale, in gasps, the disbelief of a mother.
Plastic shrouds suggest dignity
to babies of a newborn holocaust,
forfeited in a combustion of hate.
Why?
Why this sight surreal taped to her scrapbook?
A woman searches with photographs enshrined
of eyes and lips kissed with love.
I know her.
I see with the eyes of a mother.
I walk in cosmic footsteps to her door,
beating my chest with the depths of her despair.
She will
make me deaf to explanations,
and let me hear only the pitch her wail.
Mother,
I place my hands beneath your child’s head,
and stay for an eternity
that never this sleeping face touch the barren earth.
Mother,
I take my cup to catch your thousand tears
and drink them for my morning tea
that I may suffer the taste of your bitterness.
I reason with the thoughts of a mother.
She dreams,
She lives from this day
always on the portal between life and death.
She is, as lost to this world,
as her child taken.
The hint of her child’s laughter,
the slight suggestion of a smile,
a perfect profile on a Sunday afternoon . . .
and she wanders in the shadows.
I pray in her name . . .
Witness her questions frozen for posterity
as she walks the line between rows of disbelief.
How do we not share
this mother’s world
in which love and hate are indefinable?
jeanne rené 9/04
