As Mother’s Day looms, this year it has double the sadness.

This eve I would like to share this (unapologetically long) poem I wrote a few years back, to honour my grief and all the other people who will find tomorrow so very hard.

Motherline

I trace the unbroken motherline
Back, back through time
Mother to daughter
This fragile thread held strong
A line connecting us all
I imagine all those lives
Their dreams, their hopes
Their loves, their heartaches
Their laughter, their tears

I trace the unbroken line
Back, back through time
Mother to daughter
My mother drawing me flowers in vases
In a flower power age
My grandmother eking out rations for her daughters
Amidst the bombs and dust and masks
The great grandmother who nursed her children
Whilst plague stole so many other daughters
The great grandmother who stood in fear
As armies from afar marched through their fields

I trace the unbroken line
Back, back through time
Mother to daughter
The great grandmother whose clan raised great stones
And greeted the sun’s returning
The great grandmother who sat entranced
At the flickering patterns of fire on cave walls

I trace the unbroken line
Back, back through time
Mother to daughter
The thread reaches back
To when we first stepped down
Out of the trees
It stretches back
To when we first lifted our heads
Out of the ocean
Back and back and back
To the moment
We split from that lonely single cell
Into two

I trace the unbroken line
Back, back through time
Mother to daughter
This wonderous, shimmering thread
Was handed to me
A sacred thing
Yet no more or no less
Than billions of equally precious threads
And when my time came, I…
I let it run out here
That long, clear thread that endured
No matter how thin or worn it became
This tenacious thread held on
Kept the unbroken line of connection
Through so many generations
So many lives
Until I let it run out

It wasn’t even that I consciously broke it
Sliced it through by choice
No, the plan, the dream was
To pass that golden thread on~
To the daughter I never birthed
But time and love and possibility eluded me
And all too quickly “one day”
Became missed opportunity
And all too soon
Missed opportunity
Was finalised by drugs and scalpel
My fate sealed

I can’t truly stand with grieving women
Who lost a child that came too early
Who, for too short a time
Owned the word mother
Instead, two flickers of possibility
Two question marks
Two will-never-knows
Are the closest and the furthest
I have been to their world
Was she there, my almost daughter
In those few weeks before
She slipped, indefinite, undefined from my womb?

I trace the unbroken line
Back, back through time
Mother to daughter
I carry the burden of grief
The loss of what might have been
I carry the weight of responsibility
Of the obligation unmet
I carry the heaviness of failure
Of a purpose unfulfilled
I carry the magnitude of such great gift given to me
That I never was able to bequeath

I trace the unbroken line
Back, back through time
Mother to daughter
And hold the end of the thread
Tight, tight in my hand