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“On Mothering, Mortality, and the Wankel T. rex” & “Telling the Bees”

On Mothering, Mortality, and the Wankel T. rex

 

 

Easter morning, my sleeping teenager hushes the house,

the only child still here, and not a child. Too old

for the scrawl of wax crayon on shell, the patient perching

of bent copper handle into purple vinegar. Too grown

for searching out candy in the same secret places.

 

At first, there’s a kind of sorrow in his slumber, for me.

He’s moved beyond belief in the unbelievable. Already

we don’t go to church, the day mostly just a holiday

all these years. A cake in the shape of a lamb, stuffed

rabbit named Cartoon nestled next to jellybeans.

 

The resurrection, the empty tomb, that is Easter.

But how to suspend disbelief, hold wonder beside

the cruel and brief world? Yet, next to the loss

of childhood, so much is gained: height, reason,

the late night deep conversations, the mornings

 

now more to myself as hours stretch, long and lanky

as my son. I’m not waking to an alarm to hide

chocolate eggs among tree roots. Instead, I pour coffee

and head back to bed, listen to a radio story

on rancher Kathy Wankel finding a T. rex in Montana.

 

He had been eighteen when he died, excavated

66 million years later in a kind of a rebirth. Wankel

became a mother by discovery. She called him her

big, ugly baby. He’s beautiful, she said. And, as mothers

must, Kathy let go of what was never hers.

 

Birth is long, but everything that happens next is longer.

Is Easter also fossils found, old bones born again

and delivered in protective cradles to the Smithsonian?

Is it daffodils and hyacinth, plastic baskets, pastel dresses?

An empty nest, fledglings flown to live new life?

 

Today, and just to me, it is my fourteen-year-old son

snoring behind his closed door, drawn shades shrouding

spring. I let go, decide he’s beautiful lying there

in the dark, unrisen, unmoved by the day’s surprises,

unafraid still of how we’re only mortal.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Telling the Bees

 

 

The Queen has died. The Royal Beekeeper

has visited the bees and put them

 

into mourning. I want to knock on a hive,

tell the bees my mother’s heart

 

needed repair. She is my monarch.

I got lost in Mount Auburn Cemetery

 

trying to pass the hours of her surgery,

followed Elder Path as if it led to my ancestors.

 

On another avenue, under a thick-limbed willow,

I tried to understand the carved letters —

 

what they said, how people could have

taken knives to bark and dug in,

 

adding their names as if the trunk were theirs.

I will apologize to the trees.

 

I, too, am a keeper. Have counted on nectar.

Have expected continuous honey.

 

I will tell the bees I am sorry

we don’t protect them, as they protect

 

their queen. I will apologize to my mother

for not loving our Mother as well as I should.

 

I will do as I am told. I will lean into the end-

of-summer goldenrod, and listen.

Contributor
Rebecca Hart Olander

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Haydens Ferry Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, and her collaborative visual and written work has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her books include a chapbook, Dressing the Wounds (dancing girl press, 2019), and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021). Rebecca teaches writing at Westfield State University and Amherst College and works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press.

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