sisterhood

My body is struggle, 

And grief and strife

pouring down from the great sands of time; 

It’s my Polish mother in the fields

to feed her children

or the cobbler’s wife scraping together

and sewing together, scraps to survive

and the first chill of zima, 

where women knew, they knew

the secret marks of stray men; 

My mothers have never done anything great but

they whisper the secrets of women’s history, 

of known, untold stories, like black widows

Descending from the sky 

and named storms, women are storms, 

on how to survive;
and my body is a temple 

Not to men but the marks of history

where my mothers bore 

the weight and the struggle of time, 

of faded beauty and sisterhood

and motherhood

timeless ties tying together 

blood womb and without womb, 

women to carry ourselves without, 

and we forget the words 

Without the shape

and the marks of stray poison 

where the mothers that created 

Or nurtured the not-loved curse

of the without, but sharpened the tools 

in which they forget the time, 

Timeless, bloodless sisterhood; 

and we ourselves like pillars to the stars

earthly temples and not heavenly secrets, 

to turn and turn the endless tide 

of blood on the history of women

etched into the shape of what reaches to the sky; 

but my mother knows, 

My mother knows love, so much love

But I know bitterness

from my body pours another struggle, 

grief and secret

and it covets what was destroyed