The Child That She Could Not Bring Home

Yvonne Brewer

They ripped you from my teenage womb,
In a dark loveless room.
They dragged you from my helpless arms, but not from my broken heart.
Stole my child, but didn’t steal memories that would tear a soul apart.

The Spring morning that they took you, I sat on a white cold bed,
And I thought,
“I am a Ghost Mother now, walking like the dead,
This bed is like my grave.”
And I stared at my little child’s future, that I had no power to save.

The Spring morning that they took you,
I was so empty except for a heart filled with sorrows,
Heavy with grief for all the black tomorrows.
So I gave you all I had that day, a heart of sweet golden tears
That I quietly wept as you soundly slept, unaware of your mother’s fears.
One tear, for every moment and every year
That I would not be there,
When you cried or when you smiled,
Or wondered did She care?

How I blessed you with my tears of hope and gold,
And begged that somehow your little soul
Would remember the young girl who sat all alone,
That Spring morning,
In that dark loveless room,
Crying, for you,
The child that she could not bring home.

Bábóg

Molly Twomey

In class, I use you to teach súile, lámh, ceann.
They grasp for your tiny arms, the red heart

I stitched on your chest. They pass you around
so gently as if a tight grip might make you slip away.

They stroke your sewn mouth, whispering béal.
At lunch someone always cups you

like a ladybird to give their small worries to,
the aftertaste of apples, cheese strings and fruit gums

entering the space where I have left out a nose.
I don’t know if that’s because to make you smell the world

would be unfair, or that I knew I would spend hours
hovering my palm there, trying to feel blood-warmed air.