Through the Gates.

Somewhere, closer to an ocean where
waves crash into explosions of white;
a mother, cradles her dead baby in her arms.

She sits, humming a lullaby of which she knows the small
corpse cannot hear.
Singing words in which the child – Who is so oblivious to language,
will never be able to grasp at and keep.
Please wake up.
Wilting under the light of a moon which
resembles the last rice cake the world had denied her, She hears,
balanced between each syllable; the unmistakeable
tints of grief.
Gorged, like sudden shadows growing through the dimly lit
window.
Such things could not be wiped away by an abrupt light.
Unseen.
The dawn it feels, will never reach its limbs out over these buildings,
darkened by the absence of such a distant flare.

The angel, she thinks, is moving upwards. Eyes
glaring at a space limitless, unlike the womb,
swaddled in the mothers memory of the 6 months
she’d clung the small spec of unsuspecting
light within her own body, her heart, bursting out into
two.
Come back home darling. I’m not well.
The husband moves like a ghost through the village walkway,
his smile rendered with worry.
Is everything Okay?
-
-
Darling?
Just come home.
Once his tall, ridged frame (a father already in spirit)
makes way into the small house, he
stops as he sees his wife, face down, nose to the
ground, weeping.
Maybe I’m close enough to hell now, that god
will finally listen to me.
The body lies in a crib, undeniably quiet.
The would-be father shudders.

-
-
-
Fickle memory is all of which holds her steady, the swell of her stomach;
haunting as the cries which never came.
No reward for the giving,
the memory of the little body, like reckless smoke from a fire devouring
all in sight;
still hangs heavy in the air.
Its brutal atmospheric tinge something you could almost choke on.
The father begins to dig a hole.
His mental eye constantly referring back
Through the window,
meeting the gaze of his newly undiscovered wife,
her soul: holding the loss like a permanent tear in the
white lily petal of her tired iris’s.
God please, when He reaches you.
Open.
She says.
-
-
-
He opens.