writing in the dust

Jeanne Murray Walker, “Faults”

Then my mother became my child.
I’d felt so light on the teeter-totter
that I was surprised by such power,
holding someone so important
in the sky with nothing but my weight
on the other side. It was kind of thrilling,
kind of strange. And I noticed the earth
is jagged with faults and fractures.
Grass staggers in uneven dirt and
the shoreline zigs and zags. You
can never glue the two uneven pieces
of a broken teacup perfectly together.

When she died, I worried about her
as if I’d driven her to her first day
of school and left her there alone.
For weeks I wondered, did she find
her classroom? Is she making friends
in heaven? I’m trying to glue pieces
of the cup together. Heaven is roughly
what I mean. If God ever used that word,
he spoke in Hebrew. Nothing, it turns out,
has a simple surface. Maybe it’s the
missing and the faults we have to love.

[here]