“Young Mother Gazing at Her Child,” oil on canvas, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1871.
We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing we discovered was the earth.—William Anders, Apollo Astronaut
Writing an ordinary email to my son’s teacher,
about missed work or a deadline, I type
the word ‘song’ instead of son: my song
and forget everything for a moment, why
I was writing the email, why it mattered.
I remembered the way he was trying
to take and release breaths beside me,
earlier, trying to calm down and stay present
with me, both of us upset but hovering
on the brink of forgiveness. He and I, we
get there, almost always, eventually.
My song is fifteen-years-old. Listen
to the softness of that: my song.
Imagine if some of it sank
into him, into the air around him
and let him be something that might hover
or surround, let him be lament or psalm,
anthem or ballad, lullaby or dirge,
sea shanty or aria—
open the doors and windows
of what this country expects him to be,
of what I expect him to be—
and let him be melody, tune.
Let him be sung.
Rebecca Brock is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, Thrush Poetry Journal, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, she won the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize. She lives in Virginia. You can find more of her work at www.rebeccabrock.org.
