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.

∞

From the Summer 1987 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 4, No. 1)

Text © 1982–2022 by Susan Griffin 

Originally published in Made From This Earth: An Anthology of Writings by Susan Griffin, Harper & Row, 1982. Used here by permission of author.