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by Heather Carnaghan
I wish I believed in genies, in fairy godmothers and Jesus. What a beautifully comforting thought it would be to picture you warm, eyes glistening, cooing in the laps of angels and rising from your ash, a gold feathered phoenix. I don’t need three wishes or a thousand prayers of intercession. I have only one desire that matters and no spirit can grant it.
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by Heather Carnaghan
I whispered your name to the same trees that already knew it well. They wept acorn tears and clung to their last leaves defiantly remembering the spring as I angrily failed to find the words that could conjure the sound of your last heartbeat. I told each squirrel to relay my love should they find you in the wood. One stared curiously at me and, for one lingering moment, we shared the thought of you. I released a stone inked with “two months” onto the undisturbed silt below the surface of the lake. It’s tiny engraved fox will soon be covered with ice and, like your hiccups, only I will ever know it was there. by Heather Carnaghan
Missing you is a physical ache deep in my chest; It’s a heaviness that bends my spine and burdens every step. Is there something deeper, truer than “I love you” that a mother can tell her child? I love the smell of the forest. I love the taste of a raspberry plucked sun-warm from my grandfather’s garden. But you, you are a need in my soul that “I love you” can’t explain. What words hold in them every breath I breathe? by Heather Carnaghan
There it is, the look of recognition the scan of my body and the moment she takes in my shrinking waistline. She gleefully asks, “Did you have the baby?” Timidly, I squeak out “Yes” My nod is too emphatic; it raises alarm in her eyes, She was born, but “No”, my head sways left and right, less adamantly more confused She never came home with me that day Her eyebrow raises and I doubt my answer Should she count less than babies who do? My head bobbles, my gut contracts. My limbs itch to run or fight. I race to the nearest locking door so I can catch my breath before the next “How many children do you have?” “Where’s the baby?” or “We’re expecting!” by Heather Carnaghan
It is no religious miracle nor medical marvel that I have survived for one month with a piece of my heart forever gone. It is a feat of strength borrowed from friends and carried by you. In my weakest hours and ugliest of times, when I had nothing to return, you held my hand and whispered, “I love you”. by Heather Carnaghan
Your chocolate brown crib so carefully assembled and covered in the softest bedding has a flowing ruffle below. A mint colored blanket stitched with love still sits folded in anticipation. Your name is painted in cheerful script behind a delicate paper mobile hung to make you smile as you gaze up at it. All it does is make me long to know the color of your sleeping eyes. Hazel? Green? Or chocolate brown like Daddy’s? by Heather Carnaghan
All of the broken promises of this beautiful and awful date are heavy in a place in my heart where, now exists only stolen hope. Who I was and who you would have been died that day and left me with all of the parts of motherhood that the drug of a newborn’s smell subdues. How cruel it seems that I also have this love that is so deep that I will take all of these awful things if they are all I am meant to have of you. by Heather Carnaghan
My heart has lodged itself deep in my stomach, wreaking havoc on other vital organs. My throat is full, choked by words I cannot find and a howl I cannot let escape. Grief is clawing at my soul A fierce and frightening beast that haunts my dreams and lurks in the shadows of every waking moment. Fear surrounds me, filling places it never touched before, of returning to life of mothering as a ghost, of all the “nevers” and “withouts”. by Heather Carnaghan
A hole so vast and so deep that the dropped stone never makes the telltale “thunk” as it collides with earth. An emptiness, infinite like space. expanding, ever larger the longer it exists. It sucks the air from my lungs and swallows every possibility. Into the blackness go her lips and her eyes her kisses and the things she would see her tiny fingers and all they might have held her perfect feet and all of the places we should have gone together. by Heather Carnaghan
The day you were born still and silent my heart was shattered into fragments so sharp that they pierced through my whole life and opened wounds that will never heal. I held your tiny hand and stroked your chubby cheeks. they grew cold as my own warmth seeped out of you and the corpse color crept over your perfect toes. |
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August 2018
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