Photograph by Dels Richter
Nut, the Sky
It would be easier to be a cow
or a sow of many dugs, nursing
the stars. Only the tips of my toes
and fingers may touch the earth.
I give birth twice a day. The rest
is labour pangs, worse than the birth
of my own little children.
Children, your faces light up the sky,
more than the stars. Remember that.
Yet it is enough to grace the feet
and face of my husband, stroke his flesh
gently, softly murmur his name.
It is enough to swallow hot sun, cold moon,
hear poetry cried by the dying. I regret nothing.
Jennifer A. McGowan’s latest pamphlet, Still Lives with Apocalypse, won the Prole Pamphlet Competition this year. She’s a professional calligrapher and illuminator, is disabled, and prefers the fifteenth century to the twenty-first.