Gerda Finally Sees the Broken Fragments

[Gerda]

Thank you, DnJ, Grace, Scout and CanBird, for these wonderful messages. I read them all the past few days a few times and they brought me a lot of comfort. I will write more soon in reply and reflection but the love you sent was amazing and just what I needed. Love to you all, and a Mother's Day poem for three out of four -- or for all four, since DnJ has filled the Mom role -- esp with D17 -- rather impressively. And Happy Mother's Day to Job and Westo and Kml and Bttrfly and Peace (and Own, if you ever see this!) and all the moms I know here and don't know here who are reading this message now and always -- remember that your stand through MLC is the most amazing gift you could give your children, they are watching how you kept your focus on their needs, watching your strength and courage and hope in the face of this MLC tragedy, and that memory will feed them all their lives...


If I Sleep While My Baby Sleeps

By Alice B. Fogel

I will hear his sleep
in and through my own, my sleep will be bathed in his as if we slept in one same fluid

My sleep floats within a listening so deep that the separating spaces of air become
as pliant and full as snowfall,

its singing silence as profound

My ears and his throat —
the sensation of anticipated hearing close inside the ear
and the incipient murmur or cry forming at the end of his sleep — borne like birds and thrumming on the air of rooms between us

My own sleep will be his
clock, safely keeping time,
his sleep tunes my dreams to listen, our sleep binds the hour,
heavy and warm,
into a blanket of air
and sound