Daughter
© Barbara Bales
It was late the next morning
Before you got here
Welcomed by weary parents
Caught by Dr. Schecter,
A girl. Your love settled over us
Hearts inhabitant moving into our souls.
Our love enveloped you provident, ample
To sustain you until you got old.
Twenty-one is just full-grown.
Loving life in the bourne of your growing
Summer night still early who could know
Run over, light smited, life stolen.
Our souls chase your soul. Anguished
Hindsight drives us to discipline:
Dont you dare to step off of that curb,
Not before we can walk you across.
Souls panicked grasp after your hand.
Can you imagine what just almost happened?
Daughter! Oh. Oh. It happened
No. But it did happen. It was our daughter.
Your delighted expressions remain after you.
You are twenty-one, just grown, just always
Murdered away from all your tomorrows and all your
todays.
Be patient as our souls loiter close to the solace
of your yesterdays.
An Amateur Mourning Map for Mothers
of the
Recently Murdered
© Barbara Bales
The terrain is extensively traveled,
Though to my knowledge never charted.
Trust your reluctance,
Grip the remains of your faith,
Know you have no choice.
Mourning begins at Shock Summit and wends its way
Across Hills of Horror to the door of the
mortuary.
There you celebrate and prepare to bury your
Slain child, after which those who sustained you
From the first phone call to the funeral fade,
Even as the flowers are fresh on your babys
grave.
The living return to their lives and you alone
Enter the Desert of Despair at the section where
Only mothers of the murdered gain admittance.
The apparition beside you is either your dead
child,
Or a hallucination grown from your desire.
Either way cling to that apparition
Step in line with the many mothers
Forced on this treacherous trek
Fraught with troughs of tormented thought
Toward all of tomorrow bereft.
Can you trust a moment of post-mortem joy
That visits you in your sleep?
Will you ever want to be awake again?
Admittedly Ive not traveled that far.
I have surveyed a span a bleak that
Challenges that dares that forces me though
stricken to move.
Not a room, not a street,
Not a moving crowd of mourners,
But an eternity imposed upon and enclosed
Within a lifetime -
A lifetime left to hold a death within.
My life, that gave life, which was then
Robbed by a person who killed and still lives,
Moves slowly but necessarily
Toward the conveyance of its finest fertility
And fiercest love, to the other side
Weighted, shaded, dressed for a funeral,
Crying, keening, asking why.
Lingering longingly beside a blank infinity
That was supposed to hold her childs life.
Night
© Barbara Bales
I want to prowl the night like an energetic ghost
-
Want to plumb the facts out of the past
to hug the night like
Night hugs the desert
As if it could last -
When the day holds sway
I want to know
I did not waste
in the hours before
I'll be
the Night blooming jasmine
I'll be
the Cactus at dawn
In the heat I'll be
Sand or sweat
Salt or sunburn
Not gone.not lost.
Not diminished
Day does not take a history
Light does not sour me, nor erase
energy the Night
Insists upon lending me.
Testify
© Barbara Bales
Of course I have worshipped
At the shrine of the holy dick
Love was spelled about and into me
Like a craven curse attendant from birth
I fell and fell and fell in Love,
Wetted, alive in the spillage,
Bringing forth many children.
I sacrificed tongue for tongue
In the sacred secret places.
A common godly experience
I studied like a catechism
Sister to sigh, slave to touch
Illuminated, small, in angelic spotlights,
Turned in perpetual curled embryo
Transcended by a mans magnificence.
One can attempt to prepare for baptism by
The Absolute Church of Desire;
One can read of tears and fear and be unready
For the exuberant wetness of that fire.
Spent, heartbroken, just in from hell,
My heaven-fed tongue struggles to tell, to tell.
Bekah, Someday
© Barbara Bales
Someday I will fill the silence
Your absent voice inhabits
Someday I will share your lost laugh
And fly with you upon it.
Thrust early and unwillingly toward
Every true issue, forcing my way
To nether worlds away
From the terrible quiet
Where your noises used to be.
Cleaving to remembered sneezes,
Filling up on your choice of words,
I am an engine breaking down
At too many corners.
Knowing too well
The emptiness in the street,
Your even breathing during sleep
A vacuum now, an avenue.
Must I apologize when I admit
I crave your white light Bekah?
Last Call
© Barbara Bales
It is growing closer to the closing hour -
Those nasty moments of neurosis
Taunting me
Their cackles echo the slap you left behind you
When you calmly said to me,
You are the reason I am tired.
This is the ugly time, the worried time,
The teary time. (I hate it)
My fingers itch and grope for the phone
As if I could take delight in your silence.
And if I do get your voice, you are
Put-upon, beset through no fault of your own.
You become the long-suffering.
And I make you tired.
You cannot understand
A woman wasting her time
Listing the lies you told her
Insisting you witness the moment she knows
Making you know that she is aware
That again you will not make it home
And she cannot sleep for your absence,
Although she is unspeakably tired.
