Say it Anyway
Mother toed the straight and narrow
while you pined for her face
gleaming at you, you,
her glistening port,
then raised your sail
for the vast green realm.
You’ve summoned your mother
to bear your whole life
it’s her
you’ve been calling
from swollen temple
to burning feet
where even brown eels
lay their eggs,
build their homes
among sea anemones
and turrets,
and all our swashbuckling
and clanging
swords, our bodies shedding
their dutiful cells
on the naked shore
for her heavenly gaze
couldn’t fill the longing
ebb and flow
everywhere
you weren’t,
she was
a marsh
I was
a fen, there was her name
and mine, then
the wide lower course, open sea
a cove and coral reefs, rain
of stars, wave, crest
curling under, the taut
close, the whispering
efferent force
pulling, the terrible
cry of gull, the say it
anyway
I’ll never leave you
anywhere
we clamber on
unmoored.
Robin Carstensen
Robin is Switchgrass Review Co-founder and Senior Editor. Her chapbook, In the Temple of Shining Mercy, is the recipient of an annual first-place award by Iron Horse Literary Press and was published in 2017. Poems also appear in BorderSenses, Southern Humanities Review, Voices de La Luna, Demeter Press’s anthology, Borderlands, and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland, and many more. She directs the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-CC where she also advises The Windward Review: a literary journal of the South Texas Coastal Bend.