Vol 2 No 1 2008
Margo Berdeshevsky
To My Friend The Midwife
The girl determined to change it
all, tears like pick axes against walls of
the ignoble news. Body parts or blood where
her sons have island-danced. What bandage
for babies she ushered, whispering a name of
God in each ear, emerging? What
toweling for this & not that grave or
grieving? Midwife for the gentle
births, girlfriend with guts, it’s getting
worse not better, let’s
yes get disappearing drunken monkey-
eyed & stop our dreaming. Let’s get
young & ignorant. We were going to
be old ladies at a Paris table checkered
for banality & charm. We were going to dance with
sons. Let’s get middle aged & merciful with the god
dam god beloved, who needs our prayer the most this
night of fallen dust and lark.
Let’s hush. The hawk in every land is chanting.
Let’s not sing. Your babies should stay unborn,
my darling girlfriend.
Put your profession back in its dream case.
No cellos. No more important sounds. No more umbilici
curled & buried for peace under mango root & breadfruit.
This is again no autumn for hosannas, dear, when dancing
knees on an island of temples have lowered to the drums of one
more month colored unnatural crimson, another floodlight of
curdled bloods : I tell you, stop the milk, my friend : to
the girl
determined to patchwork our world, I have nothing to bring you
from the far rim of this circle : it looks the same over here : equinoctial
rain like razors splaying the flight of eyes. But stop crying. The
world
we wished to alter is phoenix wing & sewn to every other shadow.
We will let it fold. And beloved, burn.
©Margo Berdeshevsky
(prior publ. in French translation: "Europe" Winter 2006,
& in English -- in Susan B & Me (an anthology)/Big Kids Publishing,2006
Poems by
Margo Berdeshevsky