CELIA LAWREN

Metaphysical questions posed to my newborn granddaughter

for Frankie

While you still taste stars…

Do you float like dreams in a world where dreams are reality?

Are you in a twin galaxy linked by a silver thread?

Do you feel like the shearing of ice from its sheet?

Or are you enveloped in Earth’s deep unifying Om?

If you only know brine and breath as one, does the breath of air

   burn your throat?

Does the song of creation still bubble through your veins?

Are you sparkling Venus that hangs from the crescent moon

   outside the hospital window?

Or a handful of salt offered as a covenant with humanity?

Are you the first thought of god?

Or is your god the cord that nourished you?

Will you remember me by my voice cooing these questions?

Or are your memories more like birdsong at the end of day?

I want to know these things because I can’t remember.

Celia Lawren is the author of the poetry chapbook, Among Dead Things, a chronicle of tragedy and resilience, published by Finishing Line Press. She is the winner of the 2021 Poetry Prize awarded by the Knoxville Writers Guild. Her poems have been published in Catamaran, Caesura, Tule Review, She Speaks: An Anthology of Women of Appalachia, 2021-22, and Colossus: Freedom: An Anthology of Voices Across the Carceral Wasteland 2022. Lawren resides in Knoxville, Tennessee after living many years in the San Francisco Bay Area.           

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