Poem for 9/8/22 - my mother used to have that dream by Elana Dykewomon

my mother used to have that dream

by Elana Dykewomon (see her obituary here)

We were standing in her kitchen

the kitchen of the womon who

had been my lover

I was trying to leave

She didn't want me to go

I didn't want to go 

but I could see no other

way to be

She could not move toward me

she was crying

she said it wasn't that she

didn't want to, she didn't know

what stopped her

my need wasn't strange or

unreasonable to her still

she could not respond to me

unless we were having this scene

she said she dreamed she could not

move,     she opened her mouth

and no words came out

I said

my mother used to have that dream

she was standing on a beach

watching her children drowning

swept away on the surf

and she couldn't move to save them

she opened her mouth, like you

but she could not scream

I am my mother's daughter

I am out beyond the breakers

in dangerous water

the womon on the beach

sees me go down

tangled in kelp, exhausted

or a huge wave

catches me in its break

I see her standing there

fixed       unable to swim toward me

unable to make a sound,

neither cry for help nor encouragement

I have been lost at sea

to many womyn in just this way

including my mother

one minute they are thinking

everything is well with us

and the next

I'm a ghost

What they never see is how I

surface on the other side

of the wave

paddling slowly

for another coast