To Be an Honest Nurturer
Sky
I’ll remind you of calm blue.
Charge you with my electricity.
You’ll know me as the canopy,
the mother of life.
I’ll show you my vast heart.
In it, you’ll see my son.
So like me in temper and tenor,
in color and favor.
His depth like my vastness. My vastness like his depth.
See the child.
My Love for him is a device of pain.
Speak nothing to me
of worthwhile hardships, of rearing delights.
Joys come much later.
In nourishing him,
I carve out pounds of my flesh.
In cultivating him,
I defy orders of society and state —
Rules of Rapes. Marriages. Homosexuality.
My Love is for his smiles
when he holds his little brother’s hand.
Not forgiving
when he throws stray dogs and bitches to crocodiles.
It demands as much as it gives
if only to save him from himself.
Love leaks through cracks in armor — clichéd tender coconuts in hard shells.
You say, J’accuse?
What a burden is your love, you ask?
Could be. I cannot say.
You did not make it easy.
When a mother is not enough,
she fights harder.
You think no one told me?
Don’t bring -isms into relationships.
Politics and society are for gatherings and gupshups.
Want a husband? Leave feminism behind.
Want security for your children? Better forget activism.
I made a choice, and it was not the easy one.
What I’m sure of
is that horror has ambitions
like steeples aim for heavens.
All I know for certain is
of the heart that breathes in him
even when it’s as tumultuous as mine.
Do you think I’m blind
to the sinews that grow, entwine his heart?
Like gristle, unpalatable.
I think you know not that some gristle is good.
Unchewable, Unbreakable.
Hiding is not Love. It’s not my kind of Love.
Yes, I’m made of worries too.
I see the terrors
that could take him down
in all that is around.
I can see how I could
make all of him unpalatable, sinew.
What if my voice in his head
turns evil, makes him hollow?
Will he fight the wickedness in his heart
when capricious winds of existence follow?
Without this roiling child,
my spirit would have fared better.
But my watery heir is a worthy risk.
He cares and cleans a dusty ball
that brings Life by bouncing forevermore.
And if souls exist forever,
his will eternally rage
while mine will canopy, shield,
and always encourage.
Fear not, there is always calm
beneath profound roil.
Every time you run your hands
through the ocean air,
you will feel the silken truth
of our bound souls
slip through your fingers
like the golden, ethereal strands of fairy-tale hair.
Look at the man.
Listen. Feel. Sway
to the music he elicits in you.
He is made of music.
His eyes, accepting she-hymns.
His heart, a symphony of happiness and reality.
Hold out your hearts.
Look at the eyes glisten
in unshed tears for the wrought.
Tilt your heads toward
the music that is the purity of a man,
the resounding reality of the real man.
Look at him care
for butterflies and trees
for little children and their glee.
Hear his heart sing in
Love for his kind and
those of the human mind.
The gift of a good being
the world has
through me.
I can now rest, never roiling
ready for aged, tired retiring.
Didn’t work?
Cry tears of blood when
you see his tenderness taken
the horror in him awaken.
Weep for the sweet man
that could have been.
Think of that special place hell has for him.
Will he stand beside the men and women
that hit, molested, and rebuked him there?
Will they do to him then
what they did to him here?
Life gives no time nor reprieve to rest, retire. Reflect as you march to death.
Could be that I’m just a senseless firmament of air
Too vast in myself to comprehend the
little foams of the ocean.
My foreboding will make me collapse,
cause ferment elsewhere.
Perhaps the better good will come while I’m still there?
© Shweta Stormborn 2020
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