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The Green Before Her

I remember other mornings
               before she was born
                          this same green—those mornings
                          without—where the only darkness comes
               from within. Frosted mist rising
                          over the sleeper dike. Out across the polder—for miles, nothing
                                        but grasses and marshlands, Godwits
                                        and willows, the Herons still as statues.
                          Sun readying herself for dew.

Before I was mother
               all I saw in the polder
                          was the lack—lack of music, markets,
                          bookstores, concerts, crowded French-fry stands;
               no tourists bumping their roller bags along the cobblestones, taking selfies
                          in front of the canals; no people busking on the Museumplein,
                                        no church bells’ insistence, no trams clanging
                                        along the rails, no children
                          skating on the pond in the Sarphattipark.

This morning,
               from four thousand miles away, glaciers
                          on the morning skyline,
                          I am holding the idea of her as lightly as I can.
               Yes, from her birth she was already moving away
                          from me and into her own life, while I began the long strain,
                                        the pull against the mud of me, against
                                        that of which she was made—she, in her mercy, always
                          circling back, before arcing out again, each arc wider than the last.

But it was me, wasn’t it? Always
               moving away from her, steadily
                          towards the abyss that will one day
                          be my own.
               And then I think,
                          of course, it is never just one
                                        body in motion, is it? If there was a light
                                        fading,
                          it was always mine.

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a psychology professor and poet. She is a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her poetry appears in Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, The Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces and And Haunt the World (with Flower Conroy). Her full length, General Release from the Beginning of the World, is forthcoming (Free Verse Editions, 2023).

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