Love and legacy
Even cruel mothers give birth to love/
Enough of it to bring the truth into being/
Cradled in a tiny heartbeat/
Wrapped in a dimpled fist/
A reminder that this beautiful being/
Is not the pain of their mother/
Repackaged/
Not simply ancestral trauma/
Enacted on an innocent soul’s stage/
It is a revolution/
A call to something better/
Someone kinder/
Who sees life not as a prison/
But as liberation.
The anguish of our parents/
Does not have to coat the air that fills our lungs/
The heaviness of the secrets/
Woven through the foundations/
Of a broken home/
Need not drown us/
In rivers of despair that are not our own.
Life is not here to scare its children/
All it wants is to hold us in the open palm/
That caught us when we fell out of ourselves.
Why should you only allow yourself to feel pain/
Unsettled, a depression of spirit bestowed/
By those who never owned you?
Do not persecute yourself/
With the belief that you do not deserve kindess/
We are all that child/
Full of light/
Looking for the love/
We hold within/
Reflected in a familiar face/
We have not yet met.