Miriam's Mother
MIRIAM’S MOTHER
She was a beautiful woman
the color of coffee enlightened
by cream
Her multicultural mask gathered all
the credentials, all the climbing essentials
increasingly required for successful
ascent through the rugged topography
of the American Dream
For seventeen years
her purposeful stride, androgynous
demeanor, her ambiguous ambition and
intellectual poise sliced through our lives
with irresistible force, not as a knife or a
broad-axe or hatchet, but like a powerful
wind, its invisible motion clearly revealed
by the changing condition of objects
nearby! And then she was gone!
One day she returned, caressing a child,
as if a serious dancer emerging from sand
dunes perpetually shifting in some far
distant desert where culture and custom are
somehow defined by searing white light
from the immaculate brightness of an
indifferent star
“This is Miriam!” she said, as a rising
warm breeze discreetly maneuvered the
metamorphosing sands of the oasis
we shared
“And I am that I am!” she said with her love,
eternal, omnipresent, like the infinitive form
of the verb “to be” that forbids conjugation
in describing the essence of a transcendent
deity in some ritual proceeding
While continuing to speak, she never
stopped swaying, and without premeditation
she transformed herself into an external womb
so that she and the baby were increasingly fluid,
a curiously contained configuration of water
rhythmically lapping an invisible shore,
the baby asleep in the liquid milieu,
helpless and safe as if she had
never been born
Emanuel Carter
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