Custody
Listen.
Once, you were a small room.
Your mother's arms were the walls.
Once, you were a seed
in the dark soil of her,
fed a little, kept warm.
One day you will be a box of earth,
and that is not the sad part.
Listen.
Say it with me:
a door, a door, a door.
Say it to the girl with a book by the window
until the glass melts into a road
and the road runs to a new land.
Say it to the empty plate.
Say it to the empty slate.
A hungry belly and a hungry mind
cry with the same small voice.
Listen.
They put the river in a pipe
under the school ground,
under the noise of the bell,
and told it: go here, go now,
stay in your line.
They gave it lessons made of stone.
But water is a keeper of names.
It holds every song
it ever carried to the sea.
And one dry summer,
one grey morning,
it climbed up through the tap
like a word climbing up a throat,
and the river,
the river,
learned to read.
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