Hearts

Looking through sound at my grandson
before he is born, the spine in the darkness,
the small white heart beating. Then
I saw them lift him to the world. Oh,
he has loved our horses, been my green branch.
Now he knows anger,
thicket, fire.

When I was a girl I sat on the rung of a ladder
and asked my father if he killed anyone during the war.
I remember the birds were singing and how
he, that gentle man, changed to anger, narrowing
eyes: Never ask that question again.

Oh the astonishing shadows
of men and women
in the light of a simple question.

When I saw the war, the burning children
I wanted to hurt the killers. It is the way one metal
in the presence of a magnet becomes magnetic.

The god took away something from some of us
and the heart is the first thing to go.
Some days I think of that small unborn heart
plucked from the stem of infancy.
Some days I want to give myself
to no part of humanity, fallen from the ladder
so old now it has lost it has lost its rungs
just two sticks of wood trying to walk

 

Children of Light

See her. I do.
Kneel to her. I do.
What sweetness she is.
Coax her, as if you can make her believe
she will live in a shining meadow
or a cave of crystal, as if the first step
is toward an opening of sun
or star-filled night.
She will open,
from my first self
and lighten her being
with a brightness of step
and I see her like I am
myself, love her, hold her,
a hand at the back of the neck
and the girl child in my center
born to a world
not in prison, not killed as an infant,
the best of fortune
not in a flooding delta,
a war, not with a machete
to the neck, lucky enough,
not with her own child
killed before her.
She is the carried gift,
how very tender
like the turning silver
of the fish in the pond at night,
beautiful, exhausted
to come passing into the circle of the world.
She is the grain-filled, grape-filled,
milk-filled, light.
She has no fur,
no thick hide.
No wonder we are warriors.
Come on child,
even if you will never understand,
even if you will be angry
with your own kind.