We large female children who find ourselves rocking
one another in rhythms of cradle and breast,
who stand in line to honor our dead, our grandmothers
our lost boys, we rock on our heels, kiss
the brows of our fevered sisters in search of ourselves,
our missing colors, our unspoken promises, our unnamed
regrets, we move to the heartbeat
of an earth in motion, the pulse, the throb of blood
in our veins, disasters of our own making, the things
that wash back up on our shores long after we thought
them discarded for good. We rock our daily slippage
of tongue and tooth, smile across a crowded room,
at loneliness, at longing, remember the emptiness of
the unreturned call, the first time we cried when
no on came, found our fingers, our toes,
the comfort of the body moving forward and back,
We knew then we’d go on, tuned with heartbreak and resolve
companionable, if not always kind, for the long journey,
bearing the weight of the mother lode.
In Conversation With…
The Network of the Imaginary Mother (an excerpt) by Robin Morgan
Early Morning Poems 