My Mother's Poem

I came here as a Sunday morning,
too quickly
for your sleeping doctor to rise in time.
Your younger sister caught me,
in bare palms,
and you both laughed through awed tears.
She loves to tell that story, her
unpracticed hands
enough shield and cradle for two.

I do not ever ask where my father is,
or when he arrives to hold us both
because I also inherited our
hourglass wounds
from carrying a wedding bouquet
of someone else’s pain to my body.
And so if they want to leave, I let them
leave.

Mother, like you, I am threshold
and home.
The refuge in which they seek warmth,
and the uncanny stairwell they will
not descend.
Goodbye was, for the longest time,
surgery.
A gruesome extraction of that which
was embedded
inside.
But I know, now, that it is labor,
as it is through blood and love that
we are delivered to those meant
to hold us