The doctors said she was to die by age two
Do you know what it is to bury your child in your mind before she’s even taken her first steps?
You savor her like that last morsel of sunset before an eclipse
You hips become her crib, your arms her home
Never letting her inch outside of the edge of the earth flickering in your eye
And on her second birthday you celebrate it like judgment day passed
Like a new millennia of years in each extra second she spends on this earth
Her birth relived in your mind with every crossed finish line
Like she must be Christ resurrected, a miracle born to remind you she is still alive
She is so alive you can hear her breath drowning out the country breeze at night
So alive her feet cannot stay planted longer than the ticking metronome of her heart
She is art, abstract and difficult to understand but dazzling none the less
And at best, although she didn’t grow into the standard the critics accept
She was still the most beautiful artwork you’d ever seen
Her face birth marked by foot printed scars,
Her mouth angled and protruding like a rainbow
Her back crooked like the glorious hill of a mountainside
Baptized and confirmed in the church where you spent your days and nights
Mailing light thank you notes to God through the mouths of the ceiling
Do you know what it is to bury your child in your mind and live for her resurrection?
And just when you begin to settle into the comfortable nooks of your thoughts
What you’ve taught burns slowly like splintered trees at the crossroads of her youth
She is proof,
that bones brittled and bruised enough from insults will crumble into the first palms
That are willing to touch them,
No matter how lilting and faded the masks above them are
The doctors said she was to die by the time the child lodged in her belly is birthed
And you hated this child like it was cursed
Like it is the devil branding smoke signals through the inside of her womb
A tomb planted and buried into her body
uncovering ghosts crawling nightmares
And remembered fears into the walls
like a tide washing back the demons it stole before
And when the child is born and healthy and she is still alive for that mouthful of seconds
The baby’s first cries couldn’t match the raging rivers flooding the quaking planes of your eyes
Your hatred tumbling like curtains revealing some open field of a dream you crumbled beneath your bed some years ago
Where an angel birthed you a grandchild in those seconds when it was supposed to be in heaven
Placing its feathers on this baby’s brow, on the petal-like smoothness of her skin
No sin has ever produced a miracle more tightly stitched into fabric of a human being’s cover
She was a better mother than you could have ever aspired to be in those last minutes of her life
She savored her like that last morsel of sunset before an eclipse
She made her hips become her crib, her arms her home
Never letting her inch outside of the edge of the earth flickering in her eye
She lies in the bed still like a coffin,
Her womb pouring out debts of all the soil tinged blood she has been bottling into her breaths for years
Her fears backed into her lungs quivering earthquakes as her ribs dance like feet running home
Her lashes ticking seconds on clocks running backwards to the times when she was supposed to die before
Her lips quivering speakers for her voice like a faded traveler singing a distant song
She whispers into the dark empty amphitheatre of your ear,
"Please, take care of my little girl"
Do you know what it is to bury your child and hear her say your own last words?
