The woman saves every heart- or wing-
shaped rock she finds, studding the mountain
with markers. When the babies don’t breathe,
when they arrive frail, small enough
to be cupped in a palm like a bird found
fallen from a nest, their dusky, blue-gray
heads too heavy for their bodies,
she nestles them down into the soft earth.
Even when there is little—just pulp,
a tuft of hair, once even a tooth, so peculiar—
the earth takes it tenderly. But for the woman,
the end comes in blood, nothing even
to bury. She delivers babies to the holy
wilderness of this mountain but bleeds
her own into cloth—no recognizable shape.
The woman can’t even make bones.
Burning her soaked and rusty clothes,
she hears a song in fire and farther off
a howl so mournful, it could be human.
Maggie Smith is the author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria, 2023); Goldenrod (Atria, 2021); Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (Atria, 2020); Good Bones (Tupelo, 2017), named one of the Best Five Poetry Books of 2017 by the Washington Post and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize and the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, Smith has also received six Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
