Fifteen Years A Mother (For Kristina)

(A poem about eternity, in the light of maternity)

The sky is blue

like the bluest eye of Heaven, the sun like it's pupil.

I am underneath with my little book of memories.

I can read it because there is light on and around me, 

the glory of an opened eye, giving sight to my opened eyes.

I pray I may see.

(So goes the prayer)

Let me sit at your feet as you read me a story.

I do not see time, nothing moves.

How do we get from this to that, morning to night to morning again, 

when we never see it moving?

I once held a baby who would always be a baby in the intensity of the moment of need meeting and limited sleep, unaware I was teaching her all she may never need.  Yet I did not close my eyes and she has grown as big as her Mama, and she is teaching me. 

And I thought the baby would never end.

And the more closely I watched her, the less I could see it happening. 

But I have mental snapshots; 

click, first smiles, click first giggles,

click first illness,

click 

click to reading and writing and instruments, and never eating meat or wearing anything I chose,

click to heart break, 

click to too smart for her own good, 

click to inklings of leadership sprinkled throughout every other memory.

click,

She at stages of ever widening grace.

Yet what remains: She has eyes as blue as the ever expanding eye of the sky, 

and I am here now being held in the heat of it's gaze,

the bluest eye of God.