Recent poetry

Stars

my daughters once touched me for love or luck or merely to survive tiny fingers like
thirsty roots forced to surface tore at my clothes hair skin my optimistic frame of
bone all this to get to the heart of me revealing again and again what it is to
choose life I named every existing thing between us we invented the rest when they
come to me now these grown women felled and fallen in ways I cannot mend or
pretend away I see their eyes have become stars whole galaxies depend on for light
and warmth even hope yes that too perhaps that most of all still the question
remains how is it they have come to think of me as wise when truly I am unable
to tell them where we come from

(first published in Ars Interpres No. 11)