-->
At the centre of the earth there is a mother.
If any of us who are her children choose to die
she feels a grief like a wound deeper
than any of us can imagine.
She puts her hands to her face
like this:
her two palms open on her cheeks.
Put them there like she does
Her fingers cover her eyes.
She presses her hands into her eyes.
Do that.
She tries to howl.
Some of us have decided
this mother cannot hear all of us
in our desperate wishes.
Here, in this time,
our hearts have been cut
into small chambers
like ration cards
and we can no longer imagine every
morsel nor each tiny
thought at once, as
she still can.
This is normal,
she tries to tell us,
but we don’t listen.
Sometimes someone has a faint memory
of all this, and she
suffers.
She is wrong to imagine
she suffers alone.
Do you think we are not all
hearing and speaking
at the same time?
Our mother is sombre.
She is thinking.
She puts her big ear
against the sky
to comfort herself.
Do this. She calls to us,
Do this.
∞