I meet her at the Peace Garden gathering
where she’s singing and dancing for peace.
It’s September 11, and her belly is round
and moon-ish. She has no wrinkles yet,
no flashes of gray in her hair.
She is so sincere as she recites poems,
as if with right words and right songs
and right moves she could help
create a peaceful world that her baby will enter.
She’s a month away from her due date
and I don’t tell her those cramps she’s feeling
are contractions. I don’t tell her
he’ll cry for a year. I don’t tell her
about how they’ll laugh too loud together
how they’ll both thrive in the small night hours,
how sixteen years later she’ll marvel
at how love rules her life
in the fiercest and most tender ways,
how the boy will have grown to six foot four,
how he will teach her about fast cars and graphic cards
and forgiveness and humility and apps.
Sixteen years later, she will be less herself
and more something larger, more
driven by love than ever, though it
is nothing she could have imagined.
No, I just say, Nice to meet you. You look familiar,
like a woman I used to know well.
And she smiles in a dreamy far off way.
She thinks she knows what will happen.
Yes, I remember that well.
Beautiful, and an inspiration to reconnect with who I was when my son (my first child) was born. I’ve changed in so many ways, he a major influence through the process. I’ve just lost him last month (brain cancer) and the 2 months as caregiver, knowing the end was near, was transformative for both of us. If in 1974 the about-to-be-mother had met the now-grieving-mother, she would have brushed me aside as interference. But this inspires me to look backward with awe and gratitude.
Ms Jazz,
My heart with your heart.
Onward through the slog,
Eduardo Rey Brummel
so loving. thank you.
Oh Jazz, heartbreaking, heart opening. Thank you for sharing this. Sending you so many hugs. Such loss, and yet you found transformation. Love to you.
So grateful I am, for this poem, and for its writer. (Didn’t you mention in one of your poems about being a verb (showing action; a state of being), rather than noun?)
Doesn’t she still think—at least, at times—she knows what will happen? Don’t we all carry on, still thinking and believing?
(Looking forward to meeting, and spending time with, mid-November you—and all your others to follow.)
And, oh…
Who took this wonderful, lush, and loverly photo of Finn and you?
I have no idea!!! Found it in my old photos … someone at the gathering!
sweet you, yes, there is some poem about verbness …
and pretty much all my thinking is, um, wrong, but you’re right, that doesn’t seem to stop me.
Yay for Mid November!
hugs to you, eduardo
I love to think of me before birth. I guess it is kind of B.B. and A.B. in a woman’s life isn’t it.