2 posts tagged “healing”

Blood of My Blood

Part One, a Fairytale in Which the Mother Cuts her Finger

The blood passes from mother to daughter

recycling, cycling through veins

the water washes away the who

she was, how she sliced her own

finger to the bone

a cut unnecessary

to bleed for her loveliest love

the daughter she pushed forth

sixteen years prior

when there was color of pinks

still left in her cheeks

and her womb was apple-full

The daughter has menarche

in the mother's menopause

She loses her mother,

or so she thinks

She loses her power,

till she gains her own power

through the bones

of a horse,

which is also a type of mother

Part two, in Which the Poet's Mother Dies

Mother, you would not have cut your finger for me

or did I miss it when you did

and placed the stained cloth near my heart

It felt like it was either you or me

sinking down in the river

and that you pawed my head

to keep your own head lifted

You did not want to die

while I began to fancy the river-bed

and the crayfish scuttling the bottom

I began to weary of the struggle

when disease took you

from inside

You had taken on too much wine

and you sank down

though in my love

I tried to hoist you on my back

and crawl with you to shore

Part III, in Which My Daughter Breathes

How it aches this love

between mother and daughter

a deep womb-heart soreness

I will spare you the histrionics

of taking the boning knife

to my finger

I can feel you

were you a world away

as if an umbilicus

stretched across briny seas

I wish to tell you

of the unfaithfulness of others

both women and men

to be wary the one who rides

with you,

who carries envy inside

cyanide capsules

I wish to warn you

my loveliest love

that you will bleed more

before you die

When I am long dead

my face as bare

as the horse's head

hung on the gate

I will enter your dreams

and the dreams of your daughters

a bit of gauze in a river

floating up

to say I am still here

My trace of blood is in you

Lucy Simpson

Seattle

4/2008

Happy Easter to those who celebrate.  Srping is a time of ache for me.  I used to think the daffodils and forsythia so brazen and wounding to my sensibillities.  Winter has an asthetic I like - the bare bones.  Especially in Seattle, you have late winter flowers. 

Something about the Daffodil especially evokes feelings of sorrow in me.  Perhaps because in Maryland they would bloom and then be laid low by mighty March winds.  Something exection-like about it, as if the wind were a noose around their thin green necks.  I think of the begining of that Wordsworth poem: "I wandered lonely as a cloud.."  Perhaps it is wandering lonely.  Perhaps emotions bloom more in this spring too.

I think it may be association for me.  Age fourteen, my family was dying in March, as the grass was greening and I walked our dog Chester, just to get away for hours.  Social services was interviewing me about my father.  I felt like the whistle-blower.  My sister was angry that I was breaking up the family and I was a "traitor" to my mother.  In late March, Child Protective Service ordered my father away.  He went to live with his mentally ill brother in a little apartment in DC. 

A few weeks later, the Monday after Easter, my father committed suicide by jumping in front of a subway after issuing the only apology for the pain he had wrought in the lives of his daughters.  The Sunday before, out driving around with my older sister, 10:45 in the morning, I was doubled over in agony and couldn't see anything but blackness and hear glass breaking and a woman's sream.  When my vision cleared, I wanted to call my father, but didn't.  The next day at that time, he died.  He had jumped hard enough to break the driver's window.  The horror of what that driver must have seen has been the worst thing to grow up feelling.  I think that the woman on the platform with my father and the driver were my father's last victims.

My mother tried to stop drinking, but it was too late.  She was soon in the hospital dying in a machine of tubes.  A month to the day later, she went with judgemental relatives around her.  I wanted to save her, though she was beyond anyone's help.  She did me more harm than my father's poisoned touch, but she too was a victim of his incredible cruelty, which often involved inciting the family to gang up verbally on an idividual.  He once had us sing the Old Gray Mare to her. 

Spring has bad history for me, as does every holiday.  Still, I am somewhat happy today as I eat candy with my children and watch them playing good naturedly for now.  A rain is coming down, washing clean the world, saving and sustaining the smallest plant.