Stillborn
by Vicki Goodfellow Duke
I.
You rocket into the world
propelled
by a gush of water-fuel, warm
and not yet blue,
small as a doll
hand-sewn,
my love
great enough to loose a sea,
tonight, your first night
in the earth.
II.
I dream of you at six,
teach you to read,
my lips rounding over
the oo in moon, so carefully, carefully jumping
the cow
you keep your eyes down
as if you know
not even I
can get you safely to the last rhyme.
III.
No worry stone,
with a dead daughter,
pin-pricked
in a deep rub-groove, thumbs
knit and bind
this blanket of a hundred moons.
IV.
Tonight in my mind
I build a house for you
from cinder block and ash,
watch you sweep with a horsehair broom,
see how you manage
the angles,
the geometry of home.
I chase you
through rooms of wintergreen
and light
you, deaf,
softly-feathered, slip
into lethe.
Vicki Goodfellow Duke teaches in the Faculty of Communications at Mount Royal University, Calgary. Her poetry has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Room Magazine, CV2, The Grist Mill, and New Millenium Writings. She has received various awards, including The Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Memorial Poetry Prize, Cyberslam, The Ray Burrell Award, and Prairie Poetry Friends’ Prize. In 2007 she was the recipient of the Shaunt Basmajian Award for her chapbook, The Year We Quit Believing.