for Sarahs and Rachels

For the ones who carry the children that are not...

The little boy on the bus last night

had lashes as black as ebony

in his fullmoon face with its halo of

blond hair, vestige of infancy.

He looked blankly through me, past me –

merciful, I think – wise child – so merciful,

ignoring the hunger he woke in my soul.

It rarely sleeps, this longing – how can it?

Too busily growing to ever lie still.

It stretches the seams of me, splitting

identity, meaning, and peace apart.

Diastasis recti:

a pregnant woman’s abdominal muscles

sometimes give way in the middle, gapping

to let the growing child expand,

unrestrained, unconstricted. Each layer

of the mother breaking, straining –

skin muscle ligaments bones loosening –

giving place, giving more place

till the child is ready to be born.

----------

He is long, long overdue,

dream of my Samuel child to come.

I wait for my Joseph, so weary, so marked

by his insistent growing, his crushing weight.

Why does my John keep on kicking and leaping,

incessant jabbing, sleeping almost never.

I am growing old,

aging on my own, and prematurely too,

from bearing my Isaac's absence.

I beg you, people of God, don't lie to me

with your platitudes born of fertile wombs

like the sons and daughters you've not had to grieve

and suggestions like mandrakes you've never needed.

Let the favored ones answer my questions instead:

when do miracles come to Shunam?

how can emptiness weigh so much?

have you never felt Rama shudder while Rachel

weeps for her children that are not?

----- 

My heart is lashed with the stretch marks of you.

Nonelastic now, it is slow to hope,

slow to smile, slow to believe.

You have loosened the joints of my courage

and robbed my mind of balance.

They say it is the certainty of gravity

that teaches us to trust.

The absence-child devours even that certainty;

I stumble unexpectedly under its shift.

You have changed my emotions, too.

She is a stranger, this woman that carries you,

that cries when she finally gets off the bus

about a merciful blacklashed child who

pretended he didn’t know she grieved.

My soul cramps for you to be born

as a heartbeat of your own

deep in reality, in the parts of me

that were made to give you place.

My belly lies flat and hollow,

my abs are neatly bound together still,

while above them, 

diastasis kardi,

you are splitting my heart apart.