When she considered your name
Emily, or Anne, or Lily
swelling with your burgeoning body
with powdered fantasies
lacy anticipation, rose dreams
if she had known this sacred name
would one day be coupled with dread, with disorder
that people would sigh as they mentioned it
with a withering pity, a resignation
implying a lost cause
that those vegetal dreams, dreams of translucent skin
of dripping breasts and small animals crying in the night
might be premonitory of her daughter’s fate?
When she first clothed your tiny limbs in cotton
dressed your form in perfumed cloth
swaddled you in a white blanket
knitted with a grandmother’s adoration
could she have known that this person the name would become
would someday loathe you?
Speak words of spite? Curse your name?
When she washed your impish body
slight and dark and smelling of warm milk
and the sweetest sweat
or blue-eyed and pale as a magnolia blossom
if she had known that this was the body
she would someday rescue
half-starved, self-mutilated, injected with chemicals
from an asylum in some foreign land?
From the devil's embrace in the underground abyss?
That this infant face, the face of love
with eyes deep gems
would one day be the face of a ruined woman
drained of spirit and of the will to live
that she would collect you in pieces,
scattered like trash on a windy day:
a plastic bag tangled in tree limbs in an urban wasteland
a grime-covered coin on a city sidewalk
or picked through like rotting pomegranate seeds?
That these eyes sparkling with future life
would one day be the eyes of the dead?
That the life she labored to bring into this world
and meticulously rocked, and nursed, and washed
and comforted, and read to, and schooled
made grow with her hopes into a new person
would someday come to this?
How easy and natural is our love for the baby
pure of mind, unspoiled and unspoken.
How can we love the stranger she becomes?
