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).