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Song For a Daughter Thirty Days Clean
by Star Coulbrooke

In the midst of her returning,
you can feel the spreading stillness
where anguish wracked your breast,
this moment of her spoken love
worth the twenty years it took her
to discover how you waited, why
you waited, while she moved
through life like wet cement.

Before the gray sludge hardened
into forms she could not break,
she somehow softened, became pliant,
putty in her own hands, to shape
a new world she might yet inhabit.

She widens her landscape, invites
your voice, asks you to sing her
back home. The brilliance of sunset
rings with reprieve, no hard glare
of morning clanging its gong, not yet,
just this stillness, this peace, this
brush stroke of luck. This simple,
grateful moment, holding its breath.

 

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