Mary MacRae
Unborn
I never really understood it. In the shadow
of Daisens holy peak, little piles of stones,
cairns, on the dry river bed, hundreds of them, hundreds
to be swept down in the flow when the river was in spate,
each - I was told - a dead child, the pebbles chosen,
placed, one by one, with an empty sound,
small memorials
to the unborn.
So when a girl surfaced in my dream, half-drowned
and stretched out her hand, I thought of children -
all the ones I’d never had - as seed-pearls that hadn’t caught
the light, washed away in their hundreds
and distant as the spread of stars that shone
borrowed gleams on my dark window.
Page(s) 8
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