Daughters of daughters

I remember a Sunday in New Jersey
making our daughter
in the damp winter light of February
and how we prayed in our own way
bruised pears,
belly to belly in a bowl.

The air smelled of salt and cedar
a merging of ocean and bay,
the way this primordial rock, this button nose
came from a seed
and from some mucous, sperm, blood --
our blood mixed and separated and divided.
The blue light of love entered my body
and turned into a pinprick of matter.

Tell me, grandmother, how
each of us made a daughter
cut from the same cloth of ignorance?
It’s an old story, mumaleh
Your grandfather went out for cigars and never returned.
Your father closed his heart like a trunk,
locked his square starched white handkerchiefs inside.
I turned over in my grave
the day your husband took a long walk without you.
We are the women who eat fire and scorch men with words.
We dream of planting acorns in the sand
tending to them the way you would a loved one.
Tell your daughter that the love that made her
is the love that made her.

But grandmother, she is a tadpole connected to my line,
and now I’m to cast her out
into some black lake,
into the quiet of a closet half empty,
the quiet of memories slammed in faces,
of days folded like hands.

1/2000 Jill Moses
Barona Poetry Fest