Confront Me, After the Death of My Mother

World, will you still be so beautiful when you unmake my mother?
World, will you still be so beautiful when my mother is dead?
World, will you make her again, will I meet her again, will she?

Will she be again in sun- stained water and rain shone stone?
Will I know her face in shining patinas of slate, and skies azure?
Will I know her in sealskin feathers and blue rosemary flowers?

World, will you still be beautiful, when she is gone and I absent myself
from myself, to abstain from the suffering that cannot truly be forgone?
World bring me to my senses, World bring me to my knees, World –

bring me to me, bring all the salt of your earth to my parched tongue.

Artist Statement

Here, I write from the threshold of the germinal and terminal: the vertiginous precipice where the seed may grow or die. I write where the subterranean seed grows and thereby dies to all it has known. I go each day to the Earth where the contours of the terrain conduct my feet in percussive and sinuous motion. Lines of lyric and moments of levity come unbidden and punctuate my mourning for Mummy. I go to the Earth to experience what dreaming Orpheus can only glimpse. I go to the Earth because to catch sight and scent of our world and each other is not to turn away from future happiness but is the spontaneous moment of kinship that is joy itself. I go to the thieving wind, the digging blackbird, and the trenchant storm felled but still rooted forest, and there I find who and what I grieve. I write to memorialise fleeting impressions of this mutable, mortal world and to linger in the enjoyment of its ephemera. I write to look back, look around, look forward, extend a hand and reach out.