For Mothers Losing

You share tonight the planet’s oldest grief,
one set in motion hard upon the stars.
Eve lost a son before she watched one leave.

In photos of the Earth from space, bright sieve
where children strain from parents’ longing arms,
you share tonight the planet’s oldest grief.

In skins of animals now marked for death,
the shock of curse and labor, agate scars –
Eve lost a son before she watched one leave.

In your own womb, it’s hardest to believe
a man could dwell, could birth his private wars.
You share tonight the planet’s oldest grief.

God doesn’t show his face, just passing breeze
to touch you gently through the loss’s bars.
Eve lost a son before she watched one leave.

He honors you, though that must seem naïve.
Your task is holding what must fall apart.
You share tonight the planet’s oldest grief:
Eve lost a son before she watched one leave.

This poem is for a friend. Her adult son died suddenly, as every death is sudden. While trying to touch her grief and acknowledge it somehow in words, I began thinking of Eve and the fact that the first death in the Bible was the death of a grown son, Abel. The first loss was a mother’s loss, inverting the expected order of parents leaving children behind. After Abel’s death, Eve’s older son Cain left. We expect adult children to leave home, but the distances are still as shocking, at first, as if each child were in exile. Mothers and fathers have the terrible privilege of sustaining unthinkable losses. For the believer, these losses echo the pain of separation the Father must feel when His children stray. This poem emerged from earlier drafts into a villanelle, a poetic form built around repeating lines. Lines one and three in the first stanza repeat as the alternating last lines of the succeeding stanzas, and conclude the poem as the final couplet. There’s also a rhyme scheme of ABA throughout, so the first and third lines always rhyme, and the second line of every stanza rhymes with all the other second lines. It’s a poetic form of return and refrain. It honors, I hope, particular losses, connecting grieving mothers to a community that shares their anguish, while also locating them within the human history of loss and the tender place it holds in the divine heart.