Double Vision
(August, 1994)
Pregnant too young by a careless lover
Pregnant too young by a ritual of rape
Surrounded by laughter and friends
Encircled by warlocks chanting low
Carefully settled on a massage table
Bound spread-eagled within a pentagram
Her pregnancy supported with pillows
Her pregnancy a low vulnerable mound
The masseur’s skilled hands poised above her
The priest’s sharp knife raised above her
His hands bring ease with their moving pressure
His knife falls! and cuts around her belly
“Feel!” he says, “The baby is kicking!”
He holds the dying unborn babe high
She sighs with relaxed pleasure as she rises
She never moves again
This is How I Walk the Edge
(1995)
I dance, I sing circles
I skid on air
I hang by fingernails
I vault for the sky
I touch, I tease
I ask without asking
I flee, I freeze
I shatter
To My First-Born
(1996)
For one moment out of time I was
Simply a child holding a miracle
Overwhelmed with love and wonder
At your tiny beating life in my hands.
From my body: pain, terror — and you,
Covered with blood, struggling to breathe,
Your life called from mysterious Elsewhere,
Too small to fill my trembling cupped hands.
Then your life fled whence it came, leaving me
A complex mother daughter sister child
Huddled silent in a far dark corner
Too young to cry for any of us.