Mother

An Acacia sweats dew onto its drooping leaves,

reflecting a sky in the unbroken droplets.

A sky that stirs, coughs, and awakens groaning.

A sky with cheeks, once full and round,

now hollow and taut with burnt skin that clings

to a jaw slack from crying,

and hipbones stretched from carrying. 

A sky whose body, once warm and wet

now spent and torn,

her womb boiled from bearing the side-effects

dreamt up by history’s 'game changers':

men in suits with broken zippers.

A sky with grizzled grey dreads,

the ends dabbed a faded corpse blue,

mocking her once wild tangle,

glowing in the dawn of the Acacia’s birth

and branching from her nape down

a spine straight and proud ­–

not yet aching under the weight of milk-filled breasts.

Breasts now sucked dry by babes born in suits.