"momma"

Multi-coloured dots surfacing unravelling an application
A sepia tinted fledgling
A public banner flying against Westcoast winds
Freefalling time lapsing brushstrokes shaping
Sympathies, birth stories, advice, anecdotes,
Something-I’ve-always-wanted-to-do’s
Magenta tag lines of enthusiasm

Compassion and personal space merge into a grey-haze-privacy
Blend with degrees in conspicuous families and rampant HIV

For this is my story and yet not mine alone

Distant hilltops connect relationships
built through bureaucratic flops
and red dreams and black keyboards and white social workers
In systems of remote Third world lands and grandmother’s heavy-lined hard-worked hands
In systems of paper piled Hague conventions and paper-cut-out heart inventions
Voices of beaten paths and less traveled luminous maps
traveled heavily
Stretching into First world concerns of family

How do I share my story while keeping yours, yours to share

Like your grandmother’s curly brown cotton-wrapped hair and smile and song
Like your first mothers tears and whites of her eyes and world-gone-wrong
We will share a lullaby and wrap you in a traditional quilt of yellows and reds
some is the corn of your country and some is the blood that was shed
And some is the bright sunshine of BC
Igniting a crimson polka dotted quilt on your bed. While
Lesotho and Canada dab pointillism dreams and
We stipple-kiss your sweet cheeks goodnight.

How do we hold onto purple faith that we are somehow doing the right thing
When so many others seem to fail fast, when there are insufficient songs left to sing
When a system that so rigidly declares us fit makes us wait into older age
And you, my child, two, my children - cry in the night in an institution that makes porridge for dinner
Stirs soup pots with bible hymns as generations grow thinner


I hold a spectrum in my hand like a tiny upturned nest, an egg-shell fragile dreamling
One that has fallen from a tree and if set in the right place, in the right way, gently
Might create unity

Fast forward flight pause in four elastic wrapped years and
Without conclusion we hold the breath-faith, twist
A kaleidoscope into crackling skies
Stretched through rough winds of values and conversations and human heart beats
And wait-anticipate polychrome possibilities