I stood on the porch of our raised cottage
and saw my two ruddy children
crouched below in the grass
over a hard-backed beetle
and I was taken with this phobia
that goes up and up with me
and suddenly I saw myself fallen,
my body twisted on the pavement,
a thigh bare and scraped and bloody,
and my two children, wooden
with fear, bent over me
saying softly, “Mama, mama.”

And I knew then, as one comes to know
things that lodge themselves in us,
that I had no way of telling them,
my children, how I would
leave them some day as ashes
they will toss out over moving water,
how they will feel abandoned
in ways that even dreams cannot express.
Lord, make room inside me for this.