by Sally Rosen Kindred
like the first
1. In your throat now when you speak, I hear the seed-cries of blue blooms from the dining room walls you papered over when my father left. In your throat it’s night. A meadow frosts and hardstars.
2. In the meadow we meet. Here our bodies are paper blooms, only the widows of actual larkspur, actual flax. Still, we lean.
Mother has spoken, like
3. Here in your throat, cold wind, a wreath of stones. Roots lit blue by skin, by your fury, break through the ground beneath me. How did I get here. How do I leave.
4. I keep telling you not to die, but you do. Meadows ago, we sang flax hymns in a candle room, wrapped in the paper of his unremembered breath.
the wet garden
5. Now the meadow sinks beneath blackwater. It is the Edisto River. Leaves fringe overhead in shards, blue pulp. Your arms tread and drip. Your Girlbloom face in the water could open.
6. There is nowhere for you to swim from here.
Praise for the singing
7. Meadows and meadows ago, you made me into skin from flax and chicory. Breath strung, the sepals yours, star to star, wet lace. Now I have no throat, only a blue paper tower in which a mother sits, cupping a river. It’s getting dark in there. I have no bones but the ones that crack through the violet grass.
8. Through the violet grass, leaning away from threats of light.
where his feet pass
9. I keep telling you not to die but you do. I tell him to stay but his voice peels from the walls, the blue beads behind it drip but don’t speak. O soft leaning. Praise with elation. I am waiting in a meadow where the candle breaks and there is no wax but waiting, no skin but ink unbeading. There are no hymns but his feet, no walls but your throat: the frost of black, unblossomed stars—not pulsing, never morning.
(Words in italics from “Morning Has Broken,” Eleanor Farjeon, 1931)
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