All our lives are just an eyelash, said my friend
Beside her baby’s grave. The troubled sky
Galloped above the narrow cold red wound
Laid open in violet-starred grass. A monastery
Graveyard: a strange, apt place for a girl to find
Herself in white, an involuntary bride
In a communion of celibates, facing God
Who had given and received in one dread day.
The little box was settled into earth,
Heavy coverlet turned up, the clotted clay
Spaded smooth. Then, having seen this birth
Complete, the new womb closed, the other children
Ran laughing among the modest, ordered headstones
In the wind, beneath the veiled and sinking sun—
Alive as fire, brief and hungry, with that abandon
Which is a kind of praise—throwing pinecones.
Sally Thomas is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Fallen Water (2015) and Richeldis of Walsingham (2016), both from Finishing Line Press. Her latest book, Motherland, was a finalist for the 2018 Able Muse Book Award, and is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in 2019.