world, a-borning

I wonder if suffering’s harvest can fit into one poem,

if a child’s last, abandoned cry

can inhabit a finite number of words?

Did you know that when a mother feels the squeeze of her labor,

when she allows her muscular womb its mighty scream,

she calls forth winged endorphins to soothe her baby’s passage?

Did you know that when she refuses the pain

she gifts her child with a first taste of hell?

Here the suffering can be quantified,

can be given measure and meaning. 

Here it gathers light and possibility. 

Here there be metaphors aplenty.

But in small homes around the world—

homes smelling of rancid oil and offal,

homes made of castoffs and cardboard,

children lie awake at night

worrying about their parents,

or their lack of parents

or their siblings

or their empty stomachs.

 

They grow hard shells around their little hearts to keep out the rain

and they grow into hard people who build small houses full of offal. 

Here I lose the string of the poem. 

The metaphor roams through crooked streets

and I can’t find the map.

I want to find some sweetness

even on mean streets, but I fall helpless   

at the feet of all those little children.

And as I fight to keep this pain out of my life,

do I also keep small winged creatures from

flying out into a world a-borning?