by Montgomery Bishop

Babies watch with wondrous eyes their Sisters. Sisters hold the gentle hands of New Women.

New Women dance to the music of the Mothers. Mothers hold fast the Ancient Leaders.

Ancient Leaders welcome the babies to the circle. The scaling dance, encircling sea and fire.

A lineage of seedlings to overarching grand-mother trees. Radiating golden strength, sewn from fingertip to fingertip.

Rose voices dark as flame and gentle as seafoam. Ancestral gates and bodies made of music and muscle.

Babies watch with wondrous eyes their Sisters. Sisters hold the gentle hands of New Women.

New Women dance to the music of the Mothers. Mothers hold fast the Ancient Leaders.

Ancient Leaders welcome the babies to the circle. The scaling dance, encircling sea and fire.

A lineage of seedlings to overarching grand-mother trees. Radiating golden strength, sewn from fingertip to fingertip.

Rose voices dark as flame and gentle as seafoam. Ancestral gates and bodies made of music and muscle.

You only knew me as a child. 

A different, sticky, distracted, unrealized thing. 

But I wish we had known each other as women. 

For I think we drank from the same golden cup. 

Our bones were formed from the same stars. 

The matriarchal blood held in both our hearts. 

People tell me I remind them of you. 

That I hold you with me in the way I speak

But I have to guess which words are yours. 

Why did you leave so soon? 

I am sad you were gone too early, 

And angry death got to meet you before I did

But sometimes, I am surprised to feel

A line inside me being pulled taut

Something deeper and older than myself 

Do you pull that line? 

Telling me, that you, too, 

I’m the first cat to a girl in her twenties, 

I’m cradled, coddled, and kissed. 

She’s clawed, cuddled, and captivated

By the black-bellied, velvet baby of the house. 

I’m the first cat to a girl in her twenties, 

My mother tongue is not my mother’s tongue. 

We sing at each other in foreign voices. 

She coos my name, sweet Lillies on lips. 

I’m the first cat to a girl in her twenties, 

We trade in affection and comforts, 

In forehead kisses and soft beds, 

In the luxury of singular and quiet love. 

I’m the first cat to a girl in her twenties. 

Her finger reaches across the canvas, 

And, unlike Adam, I connect the bridge, 

In a religious ritual practiced daily. 

I’m the first cat to a girl in her twenties, 

The steadfast companion to all her landmarks. 

Consistent in her growing life. 

Her darling. 

One day, she’ll be thirty and I’ll be ten. 

She’ll have fat handed babies, and I’ll have arthritis. 

But we’ll both always remember that once

in the sleepy whispers of morning

when you are too tired to think.

You roll over, your head finding my shoulder,

you tuck yourself around me.

You say my name softly,

asking for just ten more minutes