Letting Go and Binding Fast – A Poem for my Children

The umbilical cord

Stretches as far as the eye cannot see

And beyond that which the mind cannot imagine.

It has infinite elastic and give,

Timeless reach and understanding

For things and worlds that I cannot hope to comprehend.

As my parents before me turned their lives upside down

And accepted on trust the new worlds I gave them

So too I reach out and hold my children’s new truths,

new livings, new infinites.

There is very little old in the new

Snippets and snatches of times before

But most is new forged, new gotten, begotten

And the old is mostly forgotten.

Save for the combined tug tied up in the sinewy cord

A tug that pulls back even as it gives forward

An army of mothers have passed it along

And it loops and pools over generations, through families and out of sight

A sinewy thread that binds as it loosens, tugs as it gives

Holding and giving and letting go.

© Jillian Godsil 2012