| |
| IT was so hard to comprehend it all | |
| When she sighed casually to her daughter-in-law: | |
| “When I nursed Benjamin—length of life to your little one!—I also had trouble with the breast.” | |
| Or: | |
| “Rachel—peace be upon her!—had just such hair as his.” | 5 |
| So hard to understand | |
| That death was no abstraction to this woman— | |
| No awful mystery waiting to be solved | |
| In some vague vapory heaven, | |
| But something casual and familiar, | 10 |
| Something as close to her | |
| As her own flesh; | |
| Something belonging to her as an old possession. | |
| And she looked down curiously at this gray shrunken thing bending over her child, | |
| Clasping the diaper-pin between his little thighs | 15 |
| With the gnarled roots of her hands: | |
| This thing who was a partner to the opulent Earth— | |
| Five sons, two daughters, her investment— | |
| Flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone and milk of her breast, | |
| That was now earth of the Earth, | 20 |
| Put by | |
| Within their common treasury. | |
| Who was a sister to the trees: | |
| That spread themselves patiently in the air | |
| And in the ground; | 25 |
| In whose branches the birds nest, at whose roots the worms; | |
| That blossom bountifully for the wind | |
| Asking no questions of it. | |
| To whom Death was like an unacknowledged husband, | |
| Whose seed had ripened secretly in her womb, | 30 |
| Whose children were suckled securely at her breasts— | |
| Until he came one day and proved them his. | |
| Who was the grandmother as well | |
| To some grass and flowers and worms | |
| In seven plots, | 35 |
| Scattered across two continents— | |
| And to her boy! | |
| |
