The Women

We look to the mothers of mothers

to hold the weight of the memory

that death and birth are locked together

in the merciless gears that grind out life.

 

This child not yet

is not an equation to be calculated

but the alchemy of spirit and courage,

the tenacity of life that endures all struggle.

 

This small fleshy seed must first survive

the war zone of a mother’s body,

Find nourishment in the midst of commotion.

 

The girl so suddenly named mother must survive

the assault of this stranger entering through her

seemingly from another world.

 

Until finally, recognition.

You see yourself cradled against your breast,

alive with the gift of contradiction.

 

3-1-2022

Storm

It's that moment

when we raise eyes to each other
as if for the first time

the way you do when the storm is rising
and it is time to go, or stay, or something

the questions begin to breathe, take life
are you okay, and what do we do

you suddenly see another
and so many others
on a lonely planet spinning in space

stranger and friend strangely the same
you search each face the way you search your child's eyes
behind her expression and beyond her words for some piercing truth

caught in the tide, we have a small grasping chance
to save self and other in the same moment

and if we should survive it
to understand something new about how to become more
human.

08/21/2019

Winter

Silently it enters

a chill, a flake.

Lacy polka-dots appear in the sky,

gently they swirl, transform the outdoors

into a child’s play-toy

Snowmen, sledding, snow forts

for a while.

Today

frozen into this implacable mass

it does not play or tease.

It glares sternly and bites with Cold’s harsh teeth.

Ice over snow over ice

this white-hard rock

brings you down and pens you in.

Piles of snow in the driveway

grow faster than last year’s garden.

We frost-encrusted Iowans will not claim

to savor this white beauty (much)

but we wait for it always to come

and we wait for it always to leave

and we seek that thing in ourselves

that will outlast it

once again.

©2010 Donna Jo Wallace.