Today is my Daughter Freedom's Birthday

Rip me open again, will you?

Let me breathe one more time in synchronicity with you,

my beloved.

I miss your tiny fingers clutching my breast while you fed.

Nails so thin and new, sharp, painful grasps, far from bothered because it was you.

This little light of mine.

She shines,

I,

Mother,

am blind.

With each new awakening, I remember vividly you saying, "Mommy, wake up. Wake up Mommy, it's time to wake up."

Your voice was so mature, I'd never heard you sound like that before, I left you, a baby, next phone conversation you had the voice I heard, mature.

Despite me, you thrive.

You saved my life.

Every day I die a little bit more.

My daughter, how strange still to say.

Still, I say it anyway.

Born on this very day, we waited patiently for you.

You tried to come too soon.

MIdwife says to be with Mommy a bit longer Dear.

Excited to meet you face to face,

I still wait.

Be still they say,

soon she'll be with you.

I miss your laughing face.

Your beauty is beyond me.

I still can't believe you call me Mommy.

Oh, Freedom, beloved blessing, your name says everything.

Be you always.

Mommy Loves you baby.

I've been struggling, in battle, fighting, for you for a decade, holding memories hostage, craving for how we used to be.

No longer 2 or 3, 12 now, wiser than me.

Never stop being you, don't be like me.

Be you always.

Free.

- Warner Bailey

Don't worry anymore. 

I was here the whole time too. 

I saw you even when I didn't want to. I knew you were there, I just didn't want to look at you. 

Thank you. 

I think my love was so overwhelming for myself I resisted the pull. 

I attended the fair and rode the rides before. Like

Fiona said,

"I sleep to dream.", I

live for life itself 

and 

now I'm ready to live with you and you too.

I love.

Me.

You, I thank. 

-Warner Bailey

National Poetry Month - Day 29

And now for our penultimate (optional) prompt! The poet William Wordsworth once said that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” For Wordsworth, a poem was the calm after the storm – an opportunity to remember and summon up emotion, but at a time and place that allowed the poet to calmly review, direct and control those feelings. A somewhat similar concept is expressed through the tradition of philosophically-inclined poems explicitly labeled as “meditations,” – like Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” the charming Frank O’Hara prose poem, “Meditations in an Emergency,” or Charles Baudelaire’s “Meditation.”
Today, I’d like to challenge you to blend these concepts into your own work, by producing a poem that meditates, from a position of tranquility, on an emotion you have felt powerfully. You might try including a dramatic, declarative statement, like Hass’s “All the new thinking is about loss,” or O’Hara’s “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.” Or, like, Baudelaire, you might try addressing your feeling directly, as if it were a person you could talk to. There are as many approaches to this as there are poets, and poems.
Happy writing!  I get my prompts HERE!

Life Sucks and is so beautiful

Life sucked so bad when all I wanted was a big brother. As an only child, I asked my Mother, begged and pleaded for a big brother. "That's not how that works." I remember her saying. Which ever way she responded each time I asked was the equivalent to "No."

How beautiful life is when I was United with a son my father had with another woman, not my Mother. He's older than me. We've grown to be very close. We get along famously. He is my big brother.

Life sucks and is so beautiful.

Life was beautiful in the beginning. Full of wonder, joy, peace, excitement, newness, comfort, Mommy, home, love, playing, learning, different, new, home, love, more, future, change, same, same home, same Mommy, same love. Striving for a plato of same while every now and then venturing off to new, to always come back to same.

Change.

Along the way I lost the will to wonder, I lost joy, peace, excitement, and comfort. Only newness was the same. I became uncomfortable, Mommy seemed so far away, home was far away until one day there was no home anywhere, anyway. Love felt lost, no more play. Still learning. Rapidly different, always new. No Mommy, no home, no love, no more, seemingly hopeless. Lost. Some unweighed portion of me still striving to come back, to what? I don't know, except the feeling of comfort, Mommy, Home.

Change.

Life sucks, I'm still not awake to be comfortable while Mommy still waits for me to come home.