“I look at you and see him:
your eastern brows, your thick locks,
the way you leave trails of sticky notes
and dot the room with cold teacups;
I see the day he took you from me when
even Margaret Thatcher couldn’t help me.
I see it all over again.”
She tells her daughter
the same story she’s told her every year:
“He chained me to a bed and then…”
When the daughter removes the lamp
from her room, the room in which she
scatters notes and dots teacups,
her mother tells her:
“This is not your home.”
Her daughter pleads: “I came back
years ago, but you still see only
my father’s shadow.”
When the daughter is bedridden, hospital-bound,
her mother, through a throng of spirits
oozing from her outstretched lips, says:
“I must dash to a party because I want to…”
Her daughter mutters: “Have sex.”
And when the daughter moves to a foreign land,
her mother emails every six months;
she does not text because it costs
two pounds:
two pounds of hope.
A mother protects herself from
her love for her child.
She cannot bear to suffer loss. She
cannot bear defeat
to two palm trees and a sword,
and the guilt
of not rescuing her child
from a man who shackles and beats so
she cuts the cord.