Portrait – Part IV

Poem

Up!
She pushed.
Up!
She was still.

A dead elephant.

So still
she felt the babe’s throbbing.
They could do nothing.
Her children, 5 and 6,
fed and washed —

she wept.

Up! She pushed.
Sweated.
Clawed.
And clenched.
For weeks —
in the liberators’ infirmary —

until a twitch,
a finger, then
an inch,
an hour-long inch,
thicker than the minefields,
deeper than a mountain and its recrossing,

an inch debted to a father,
marshaled to a daughter’s thrum,

oceaned by will,
fibered by sunrise,
a tyrant won’t bend
or murderer breach,
an inch steeper than the ages
and its wrathy yaw.

She’s unbreakable.

previous: Portrait — Part III

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photograph by JUN HUA EA

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