I Am No Mary. You Are No Lamb.
At eight thirty on Friday night
not five minutes after I laid you, asleep,
in your crib, your cry pierces sharp
as a hook in a gill.
I am too tired for you.
After a day full of picking up your knock downs,
putting away your drag outs,
I am punch drunk.
If I have to enter the ring one more time
I just want to sit in my corner and bleed.
Your blue eyes have no charm or sparkle
in the dim of a princess night light.
You are as heavy on my chest
as the dentists' lead jacket, draped before an x-ray.
Your blonde head drills into my chin.
This is the grey in the shadows
of the pink and blue portrait of motherhood.
This is Jack's seventeen stitches,
Jill's three broken ribs.
This is the cry of the baby,
formerly of the treetop,
damning the wind, the tree, and the broken limb
as she falls through lilting eternity
in that cradle.
After you read this poem, read another.
The sun always comes out
to dry the drowned spider.
Jill Crammond Wickham is a poet, artist and teacher doing her best to create while caring for two children and seven cats in upstate NY. Her work has been published in damselfly press, qarrtsiluni, Blue Line, and Literary Mama.
