She Sang to Him, I Imagine
her pain ringing on a hot wild
wind, grief-bent mother of this
child, oldest human burial in Africa,
a boy, barely three, unearthed
at Panga ya Saidi, laid carefully
on his side into a pit, a pillow
fit beneath his head, small hands
curled toward his face. Our tiny
dead—for he is ours—undisturbed
in this space for 78,000 years,
fragments in the dirt revealing
the care taken in wrapping him
in animal skin, that mother's need
to see that her boy stays warm,
that, in eternity as she knew it,
he come to no more harm. How
easily we dismiss the old ones,
reducing them to flint tools
and cave drawings, caring more
about funerary behavior than about
their longing, and their loss.
Mtoto, the scientists called him,
Swahili for child, but I want to know
what she named him, how her hands
recalled the feel of taming his hair
beneath her fingers, how she turned
toward the lingering echo of his
laughter, only to find no one there.
I want kneel with her, and sing
that keening song all mothers fear,
knowing that any moment's relief
from such a void will never last, how
vast and destroyed a continent is grief.
Salvaged
things I keep
keeping, those mismatched
socks my daughter wore, the spoon
with my mother's monogram, that
ornate C, the bracelet
my sister gave me, beads as blue
as an afterthought, the feather
and gray stone my now grown
son brought cupped in his small
hands at four, standing as if
in prayer, the curling lock
of my dead husband's hair, worn
like a charm in a locket he chose
before he left, to keep you warm,
when I'm gone, he said, some
strange gentleness in what
is left behind. Think how little
depends on us, this I we cling
to against extinction, pieces,
small gleanings of lives
lived, then not. Summer still
breathes the sparrow briefly
into flight, autumn gilds its wing,
and winter sings into silver skies,
while I—that I—string my locket
around my neck, tuck a stone
into my right pocket, and move
into my brief turn in the light,
into everything, and nothing,
Mary Carroll-Hackett is the author of eight collections of poetry: The Real Politics of Lipstick, Animal Soul, If We Could Know Our Bones, The Night I Heard Everything, Trailer Park Oracle, A Little Blood, A Little Rain, and Death for Beginners, which was released from Kelsey Books in October 2017. Her newest chapbook, (Un)Hinged, was released in fall, 2019. She co-directs the Creative Writing program at Longwood University and teaches with the low-residency MFA faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan.
