I do believe in the necessity of commas, and I want to believe
in a divine something, a soft one, like a bunny I can fluff
between the ears. Today, the cat peed in the lettuce bed,
not out of malice, but because I was weeding
and I’m his mother. He wanted to be near enough to cleave.
Maybe when we were young, we thought our mother
was the real god. Maybe she was. Or maybe God
was her umbilical cord and placenta, a connection cut
when we emerged on the path toward the path
toward the afterlife. When do we sever from the tether?
Does it depend on how we were introduced:
crotchety old man in the sky booming his disapproval
in bolts of thunder. Or something in the way the sun
lights spaces between the leaves, that tunnel of possibility.
Maybe that’s the passage to the real afterlife,
or the real life, forget the “after,” anything divergent
from the drudge, like what we might find
in Alice’s rabbit hole, Cheshire Cat fading
leaving only its grin, glowing teeth.
God fading too, into this fog-like substance, the thick kind
that condenses in our hands and makes them slippery
while we continue to search for that break in the clouds,
the tip of a tree peeking out from under all that haze. 
 

—D. Dina Friedman

Poet’s Website, Substack, Instagram, Facebook

< BACK | NEXT >

TABLE OF CONTENTS