The terrain is extensively traveled,
Though to my knowledge never charted.
Trust your reluctance,
Grip the remains of your faith,
Know you have no choice.

Mourning begins at Shock Summit and wends its way
Across Hills of Horror to the door of the mortuary.
There you celebrate and prepare to bury your
Slain child, after which those who sustained you
From the first phone call to the funeral fade,
Even as the flowers are fresh on your baby's grave.

The living return to their lives and you alone
Enter the Desert of Despair at the section where
Only mothers of the murdered gain admittance.
The apparition beside you is either your dead child,
Or a hallucination grown from your desire.

Either way cling to that apparition.
Step in line with the many mothers
Forced on this treacherous trek
Fraught with troughs of tormented thought
Toward all of tomorrow bereft.
Can you trust a moment of post-mortem joy
That visits you in your sleep?
Will you ever want to be awake again?

Admittedly I've not traveled that far.
I have surveyed a span a bleak that
Challenges that dares that forces me though stricken to move
Not a room, not a street
Not a moving crowd of mourners,
But an eternity imposed upon and enclosed
Within a lifetime -
A lifetime left to hold a death within.

My life, that gave life, which was then
Robbed by a person who killed and still lives,
Moves slowly but necessarily
Toward the conveyance of its finest fertility
And fiercest love, to the other side
Weighted, shaded, dressed for a funeral,
Crying, keening, asking why.
Lingering longingly beside a blank infinity
That was supposed to hold her child's life.

© Barbara Bales 2001-2003 all rights reserved

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