I feel the grief of age behind my eyes.
Not only simple healing tears, veilmisting, sorrow cleansing,
but grief and love held fast within my skull;
the growing oneness of the bones that
are my mother’s
are my daughter’s
yet my own.
The bones they ache, each one, to tell a separate tale.
Their creaking, cracking voices all make up
the oral history of my face,
the shape of my self in this place, and at this time.
I need to cry the bones, not tears.
They ask their strong and frail stories to be wept,
to be sung, to be en-joyed,
finally to be told
to a gathered circle of girlchild faces
glowing in the everfirelight
before the everhearth,
tended by the warm and ageing hands
of the always mother.
© Annie Brosnan
