Mother of the Broken Bones

Painting by Valery Rybakow


MOTHER OF THE BROKEN BONES


Not bones broken by falls off of porches
or down stairs or drunken stumbling
or even by dogs chasing balls
but those broken by human hands
as when a woman has her lung removed
and the ribs must be snapped back
to expose the jelly flesh,
an intimacy of viscera.
Imagine them sawing through the sternum,
that thick stump of bone,
imagine the tool used to do it,
the rubber gloved hands, the spattering.
This is modern medicine, they do it all the time,
it’s miraculous and mundane and it’s your mother
under that sharp knife. She’s been there before,
too many times, for 12 years now
discovering again and again
that the body is made of tubes and fluid
and bound by the laws of physics.
There is no particular need to remember this moment—
it’s only one more chapter in one more life
as lived by millions—but there is a need
to recognize the significance of resilience,
the need we have to know
that one can go through darkness
and come out again into life,
that one can struggle even when struggling
seems impossible, that sometimes being human
is being super–human, beyond human—
the way life is larger than the forces that define it,
the way your living, your wanting to live,
helps me to live as well.

That’s why this poem is important:
it’s the story of single–celled creatures,
symbiogenesis, cellular sex and respiration:
the whole four billion year old story of life
in this universe, the miracle magic of it,
the perfect anthropic unfolding
of quantum possibilities.

To put it simply,
devoid of philosophical bullshit
(for that is how you’d want it),
it’s the story of life itself,
of how we live together,
of how we keep each other going
for as long as physically possible.


Richard Smyth

Posted over on Anabiosis Press