The Black Hole

The black hole that consumed

All of me after my child died

Actually held the ocean,

Repeatedly taking me under,

In relentless attempts to drown me

Oh How I wished to surrender,

to slip underneath

Underneath the surface of light & air

Into the unconsciousness of darkness

To disappear, to arrest my life in suspension like a bottled specimen in formaldehyde

perhaps science could make use of me in my abeyance of bereavement

Making meaning of my body like my daughters organ donation of lungs, eyes, heart valves

Yet I always surfaced, tossed back up into the bright oxygen-rich sky

Oh how I wished to breathe in the light,

to rise with the Insidious joy,

to ride the swells of life

Making meaning of my life to honor what my daughters body couldn’t—

to breathe the air,

to see the light,

to circulate the blood of my love

The black hole that inhaled all of me

After my daughter died,

Actually held the door open to heaven here on earth—

embodied infinite pain swirled into the infinite joy of aliveness

Through marination in my ocean of grief

I neither slipped into unconsciousness

Nor leaped out of the grief water

Either would have denied my truth

I held on to my truth of suffering

Holding both my pain & my joy

Breathing in my truth

I learned to breathe underwater

Like my mermaid daughter who thrived within an aqueous solution in my womb and struggled out in the air of earth

I learned to breathe underwater

only to find with each inhale,

an exhalation of my suffering,

Breathing in the worlds truth

of both pain& joy of aliveness

an exhalation of the worlds suffering

Oh how I wished I could have seen

the black hole not as a vacuum

devoid of life, but as a doorway

A doorway made of liquid light

The exquisite fluidity of Aliveness

Oh how I couldn’t have seen

What I see now….blessed be.