Lichen mummifies a silvery tree limb sheening
with drizzled rain, whose murmur mimics
shuffling feet, chained. It isn’t the ghast
visage of my son—a visceral cord twining
his neck leeched of ruddy hue, so that perhaps
a moment more, he may never have known a breath—but
the orange jumpsuit of a woman, nameless to me,
who entered the door next door, that haunts
my memory of a birthday. An officer bent to remove
the cuffs on her swollen ankles, then slipped the key
into a starched pocket, waiting and waiting like a gargoyle
placed outside the room. Who held her hand
during contractions or slipped ice chips into her mouth
or simply looked into her eyes as one human to another?
During a birthing day when lime green leaves unfurl
even the breeze seems to sigh. But in such confinement,
alone, a woman becomes the mother society ignores
like lichen lingering on tree limbs sheened with rain.