The mother gazes upon her daughter’s bruises
Blooddark shapes of rough preterite hands
That would brand her with their masculine proprietorship
Nine months they embraced in the potter’s wheel of her womb
A score of multifoliate years she spectated the unfolding of her daughter’s petals in the rain
What snaking paths in the fogged mountainscape of life have waylaid her?
How could the diamond mines of her affection have yielded such coal?
The nerves of her body so carefully tended over so many years
Now fraying thread to weave abrasive textiles upon a loom of pain
The matron lights her words with the sparking cables of indignity
Takes the action so long overdue, unites a mind’s warring factions under clean banners
Four decades of struggle-sculpted syllables raise a bulwark against the season’s siege
Experienced with the tempests of the world, the mother stands before its surging waves
Knowing this too shall fade into the curling pages of the book they pass from blood to blood
And madness if it comes, fear if it comes, will eventually drive their flaming cars over the cliffs of time
Leaving the two of them to gaze dispassionately down upon the smoking wreckage of the past
At the legacy every woman is destined to inherit until the human race breasts the tape
In a world of trophies and shelves
A world that atrophies faces into hard-packed shells
In the buckets where they thrash with all the other meat
In the mirrors where both minds and bodies cheat
The mother welds words into weapons of war
Fingers through her daughter’s hair a shield against the deep-seated enemy
Bivouacking in the darkness beneath her skin
The wellspring of her watering eyes
Beckon her offspring, her daughter, her prize
Like a windswept lighthouse
Letting her know she was born into the right house
That the night opens every woman’s blouse
To sacrifice their hearts to its dark arts
And the world that would break them
Will itself one day be hurled down
On the jagged rocks of time
Blair Bourassa 