Mother

Her spine became the earth
From which reached the limbs of spider smiles
Vines and hair
Lines of care
To age and wear her frozen face
Beaten in the lines that they drew for her
Drawn in the soils of her sillage

Her eyes became the sky
From black to scarlet to Sapphire blue
The horizon wept at her loss
Her perpetual bereavement
With moths and eulogies drifting about her open hands
Woven, stitched, and woven yet again
Amid the roars of rifle shots
And split became the ends of her hairs of winding rivers
Opening, widened, to the endless belly of the seas

Her womb became the graveyard
Of our everlasting lights
So many whispers and wails to elevate above the treeline 
Of the forests in her lungs
To draw the barren air of painful breath
Upon palsied breath
Into the ribbons of the time she wasted 

In bringing us to life.