My Gift

This was my Mother's Day gift from my husband. 

But my real gift, 

my secret gift, 

was his broken heart 

beating today with mine 

and our children 

breathing in their beds. 

* * *

the promise of morning
by M.

mothers are carved out of stone, cleaved
and grieving from the earth; their children, too

winter statues frosted and alive

alive and cold angel food iced with tears of a knowing

that is toward winter and toward those other lengths of last breaths: 

cut flowers and June bugs such brief kisses;  Indian 
Summers and cider pressed fresh; April snowmen 
and a boy named William whose eyes never opened -- 

and how can they be gone, never here,
and how can they be, how.

the world will die, placid and cooling, under a dying sun,

and be still, as it had been still before its birth,

as it had been still before the primordial conflagatory urge: 

the dawn pushes out the sun, awed and yawning, 
through the red fire horizon edge of earth;

and what mourning would there be if he slid out inert, 
all gasses unexcited and quiet, and floated to his place, still, 
in the dark sky, the warmth of her earthen womb dissipating 
as his heavenly body returned to the wild homeostatic forever -- 

even the sun will die, and her earth with him,

and each morning she gives him birth

she will take his ashes in her hands --

            “this is how you were born,
            and I have outlived you from the beginning.”