O Hannah

Oh Rachel, o the weeping of Ramah, mourning for her children because they are no more!

He spoke, and i saw the young girl's eyes, full of fears, of not bearing children, no being able to bring forth from her body something made from both of you that speaks two lines with one voice, with hair and face and form from disparate and differing line of men and women, from Scottish and from French and from Saxon and from Cherokee – the strands of vocal cords he cries with are made up with DNA – blood from both, from a unique "us."

The night went quiet around me as i watched them there on the steps, and a new fear,
sudden, loomed up as a whole world of motherhood crowded into my adolescent brain.
The horizon of love (and also loss) stretched before as if in a fourth dimension – i bit my hand, for I realized then a great burden, the loss of ignorance and thirst for ownership. This is what mother’s feel when their bellies swell, this is the wolf seizing its young with careful fangs (fangs that scythe through flesh and skin), and gently carry them into the den.

But I remember Great-great-grandmother Ruby, how she mocked fear. "God’s hand will open my womb or close it," she said after losing her 4th child. I think of her and her waiting years, of at long last holding in her arms a son, and I wonder at the green fierce feeling of motherhood and mineness of a human baby,
a child who years later when he’s clothed in the sinews of a man I can see
“Ah thus you have become, and yet I held you when you could not lift a finger in your defense, when if I left you you died, starved, stank, wailed and froze, but if I held you you had food and heat and learning. I am god to you, and yet not god, for it was he who knit you together within me, and here is your father who is the instigator of you mind and muscles.

Oh you, my phantom son, be strong and courageous, for there are legions of me out there, who would be god and not god to you.
Beware.
Look down at your stomach; see the circle stamped in you.

That circle is my legacy of life.

Yet, really, I did nothing.

I am not god to you.