Kirsten Hippe-Rychlik and we are echoes I. Mother of Mothers It is not a mother’s place to live longer than her child— this our Mother Earth grinds into our hearts and wombs—there is an order and a place to life and death. We have learned this, the mothers, not from watching the ways of living, but from the imprint of our goddess Evolution on our cells, our brains, our flesh. It is known. I began to think of her as grown, my daughter, who roamed the earth as if all of it was hers to keep, and gathered all its children in her arms— She was a mother in her own right before she ever bore the children she and I would love with fierce attention, grinding them into the stony fire of the ground and pulling them, arms limping, to the boundless sky. It was hard, even when she was seventeen and still a child, still a babe of this trial, to remind myself she was not so ferocious as her wilding hair, not so boundless as her deepest dreams, and so I made her thus: I left her growing, simply growing, on her own. When she called our satellite phone to say, so calm, the house next door is burning, I was not surprised. When she ran across the earth in 1989, out of reach of landlines and barely held by letters, I knew her to be extraordinary. She was everything she wanted to be and she was okay, floating on the waves of change as if she had called them there herself. And so it becomes, this turning in the end of my long life lived, that I endure the noticing SIXFOLD POETRY WINTER 2020
Kirsten Hippe-Rychlik
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