Message from Earthside
Featured in ‘Sunlight Later’
If I
could sit with you, you could tell me
that the light reflected on my skin was
not from the sun
but from old stars, lines of constellations poured out from in
some island galaxy mapped with my watery remembrance of light.
You were
not set in stone, yet came anyway
set in cells sweet blood dark helix chains
answering
the plea to make me new, not open to old orbits of abuse
they think I gave you life
but it’s you who stitched mine back.
Afloat on
the waves, your luminous spine shines
two halves of a brain beating from your silver spaceship
breathing in liquid bouncing in moonlight strung to an old heart
I think I met. Let me listen
tell me all
before you land and we forget.
An extra note
Both times I’ve been pregnant, I’ve had a feeling that I’m carrying a being so wise, so divine and somehow so ancient in their knowing. To me, it feels like we understand the secrets of the universe before we are born and after we die, and somewhere in the middle (i.e. life) we forget it all and desperately scrabble around trying to find the ‘answers’.
This is a poem I wrote when I was pregnant with my second daughter, Isla. I had the feeling that I couldn’t quite sit with the pregnancy- it’s different the second time when you have a toddler in tow, but I also recognise that I often struggle to sit with things when I know they are important. I kept having a nagging feeling that my daughter was trying to tell me things from in utero: that I was made of more than I thought, that motherhood had helped me to overcome years of addiction and abuse, and that I knew some of the answers too - if only I could sit still for long enough to remember them.
The layout of the poem is designed to reflect the kind of other-wordly / spacey / floaty feeling of the subject matter. Hope you enjoy it!