prompt 14 hour 14 – all my Mothers
prompt 14 hour 14
all my Mothers
“The land knows, you even when you are lost.”
and I was so lost
so very lost that summer –
the summer after she was gone
and we brought her home;
dad and I.
truthfully,
I was lost before then even
when the burrs would get stuck in my hair –
after fucking for love
and face
in the back field
on the dry Earth
on grasses more brittle than my self respect.
She knew me then
before I could see me.
she knew me then
held my wounded heart,
broken soul,
in both hands
holding me together
until I could remember me, too.
truthfully,
I thought I knew better later
when I thought I knew better than my mother
forgotten to me piece by piece
of my wounded heart,
broken soul
under the weight of bottles
too heavy to hold anymore
in my shaking fists.
this land refused to hold her
with this flood of forgetting the story of
who brought whom into the world in the first place.
She knew me then –
this land I loved –
when I took my mother’s ashes where we would skate together
on frozen, bumpy pond water
snapping beneath the surface
like my longing to piece it all back together:
-her fragments in the pill bottles we carried her in, to the places we left her
-the days before her despair when we could laugh and heal
-my broken treaty with the places I loved, who loved me back when my mother couldn’t
“the land knows you, even when you are lost,”
and I have been lost,
only remembering myself back to life
because She remembered me,
until I could find my way back to all my Mothers.
© r. l. elke