Sunday 22 September 2019

Through a Million Births






Her stories live - in the lining of my skin.
From  birth to rebirth, all down eternity,
retold in dim rooms, and across open sea,
till they’re woven out and again woven in.


Braided  into my hair when I was a child,
melded into the weight heaved by the adult,
like leaf shadows on my windows, old and dulled
by pain, like the glint of teeth each time I smiled;


they glow in the games I played by the roadside
on flights of jewelled daydreams I went alone;
in cold breaths of breath, fused in the bones of bones,
in lapsed lifetimes and those not yet occupied.


However far I fly, small or deep I dive,
they beam their muted threads into all my lives.






Last week was my mother's birthday. My twenty something-th year to mark the occasion away from her, in a different city/country/continent.  But really, what do physical distances even matter? 


This is the one cord that's never cut, not in this lifetime, nor in the next seven. Or seventeen. i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)...through a million births if there were/are to be a million.












10 comments:

  1. My mother died in 1982, soon after my first son was born. I have a picture of her looking at me as you mother is looking at you.

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    1. Photographs are such a comfort! We are so lucky to have them - ordinary people even three hundred years ago wouldn't have any family pics.

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  2. Oh yes. An innate part of us, always. Sometimes tugging at our heart strings and making our eyes leak, and at other days a deep and abiding comfort. Or both, simultaneously.

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    1. Deep and abiding comfort under all circs certainly - very well put, EC.

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  3. Hi Nila - so true ... love the line: 'Her stories live - in the lining of my skin.' Our mothers are always there for us ... even in the after life - they'll be waiting. Lovely - cheers Hilary

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    1. Ya, mothers are always waiting - in all lives and all worlds, and thank God for that!

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  4. I do have greenish eyes like my mother. And more and more, I'll say something that makes me take pause and think, "My mother said that." She's been gone 27 years or so. But she's here...always here.
    Thanks for this poem.

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    1. The older I get the more and more I hear her words come out of my mouth - so yes, I completely relate.

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  5. Nila, you capture the essence of our love for our mothers so beautifully. May you have many more years sharing that precious bond. There are so many beautiful lines threaded throughout. I can just hear her stories while she braids your hair as a child. Lovely image.

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