I tried to remember back then
when she left for a new world
calling me a woman-child
we like two tongues
tied in our two-headedness
when she saw violence in little girls
having no universe except
a naked root in the sun
and too many endings
like her father’s plinth of madness;
my mother sat upon his thorned heart
and any crack, she shone me
in the dark like starlight, and I,
like a hound kept at it
not knowing
any hunger but hers-
the scant memory of shore lines
the margin of estrangement
forever hanging in the air,
how I give and give
what she could not take.
~Inspired from Aracelis Girmay, The Black Maria, First Estrangement
