The Deep

The Deep


Sparrows up the column of the maple
make a god awful racket first thing,
first light, ever since April.
The little twerps are easy to read:
I need, I need!.
The adults, hysteric with lusty pride
simply shriek and shriek without message.
They wake the newly pregnant woman,
who can't at first identify her feelings,

but remembers another dawn, an outing
by sea to watch for whales.
Who ever honestly expects to see creatures
so ancient, so huge?
Now she rides the same unexpected waves

of sickness in unstoppable rhythm, in swells
that tossed her hanging wretched at the rail.
No one else saw the great humpback whale
who eyed her, alone there
at the back of the boat.

The birds persistant racket, the jets at take off,
sound to her ill brain like doom.
She blocks it all,
hangs on her emblem of relief;
the rolling water,
the great being revealed, real,
watching her from the deep.


Heid E. Erdrich.........from The Mother's Tongue