Mother Hurricane
BY STEPHANIE FORD
Raw root of love, deliverer, throat
singer, source and flesh-form
of foxglove and bullet
against whom the mind spins
silken tents: philosophy and song.
Here in my commute between
waking hours, I’m rich
with undoing, turn whirlpool
and fiddlehead, dream
I’m anyone’s daughter but yours.
Once, I was a spiral galaxy
in your arms. Now, time and mire
collect on the horses,
on teenage girls you coax
over hurdles, coach and groom
with sweat unto grace, and when
you change your tune, Mother
Hurricane, you assemble your children
and show them what’s broken:
Who tamed whose land
with the wrack of whose hand, who sowed
these fields with untongued syllables, bones
of the continents they call to
over lost crops? Some terrible lord
pre-owned my name. The sunflower
scatters its offspring: loose change.
