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[05] For Rockland

by Christina Gleason

We were all born brackish and small,
no taste for our mother's milk,
instead we cried our fill and crawled
a slow, saline crawl
to our baptism,
to our three miles wide,
to our necks in silt.

Oh, mother Hudson!
You were my first breast,
suckled dry by an overcrowded bay,
a December day's weak tide
pulling at your side until you spilled
into the docks of Haverstraw and Stony Point.

I felt you in my joints
on every charcoaled night
you swelled in fight to break
aginst the endless seawall -
anointed cock of Rockland,
all slick with milky foam.

Oh, reticent father,
these dirty banks are my home!
I lay my Hudson River stones
at the head of every bed I make,
your brown-green wife never far from
my surrogate Genesee and Charles.

I am in my mother's debt,
for every tear she lent in estuary
to the mouth Atlantic, redolent
in my blood, thick in my lungs,
old enough to accept the flood
that will not be stopped by the tongue.

03/06/2006

Posted on 03/07/2006
Copyright © 2024 Christina Gleason

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