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