All is burnt. We rebuild.

By day we ran barefoot. By night we bathed in her cascade of words Pinocchio, Little Boy Blue, and all that wild parade of words The room with the wandering beds where we were little girls on boats At bedtime floated away into a fairy place made of words Oh they felt guilty they’d taken us from the land of milk and Kellogg’s So they tied us to home with their endless golden braid of words Daddy read Bibles, biographies, Newsweek, and sometimes Le Monde But Mommy read mysteries, novels, poetry, in every last shade of words Of sewing and cookery, cleaning and wifery my mother taught me nothing We traveled a sparkling world behind our enchanted blockade of words Our homeschool had number cards, sundials, paper-bag horseheads But the fabric of delight was sung, recited, and prayed with words She opened her golden throat and crooned us a universe of witchery Her free-range children built of song and stoutly homemade of words

I’m a bad mother, my good mother said to me Snug and wild as she steadily read to me Worrying over skim milk, my thin mother called herself fat Handing down thick-food calorie dread to me I’m lazy and wicked, my tired mother said, up at dawn Boiling kettles. Her whip-judgment spread to me I never did what mothers are supposed to, said mine, Best of all possibles. Such goofy love fed to me She could not remember presidents or politics Oh but sonnets and songs she gave instead to me Late she told me, I never know what to say fast enough Clouds of sweet honey, breath of warm bread to me You turned out all right after all, said my confusing mother I wonder still what frankness was left unsaid to me