How are your children?
I think of how it must be
When you look at them in your arms,
Asleep with soft lashes
Against their skin,
and hair that smells so sweet.
You think how first the body makes room for them.
Then the heart makes room.
We open and close
Like tides.
The heart is the motion of water.
I brought this gift for you.
It’s a chambered nautilus.
It belonged to my father.
I’ve kept it all this time.
Do you know it forms its chambers
By the cycles of the moon?
When these animals are alive,
They rise to the surface of water each night.
And they descend back into the depths by day.
It has many chambers,
Unlike the human heart,
Said to have only four.
Mine had six,
All of them broken.
Still, I remember children asleep in my arms.
My heart had so much room for their sweetness.
When they were born, my children became curiosities.
I used to sit in my chamber
And think of Black Elk, the healing man with a great vision,
And Sitting Bull, the great and tender warrior
Who cared so for his people
And had no choice but to be in Buffalo Bill’s Circus.
We were what they were, a spectacle,
I was wise enough to know
We were objects from the other world for them to behold.
This broke another chamber of my heart.
At least the servants were my child-mates,
My own people who did not envy me.
They understood our position
And were kind to me. They came to me in secret
And with happiness we recalled our childhoods.
Then one day another chamber of my heart broke.
My own son said, “Don’t you know what you are?”
And went to his room in his father’s mansion,
Leaving me darker, older, alone.
And there were many rooms in his father’s mansion.
The children were given presents to stay there.
Now I sit in my prison chamber and hear the stories.
The women tell their stories, all but the one who never takes off her
Sunglasses, and we will never know
Any secret places in her heart or soul.
One day I watched the queen of the world
Hit my son.
Another chamber of my heart broke.
I moved from tree to tree, watching,
As if I had no choice but to hide in my own land.
And my daughter had a look on her face
As if she’d become one of them.
She wore a dress of new red cloth and bangles and charms.
She held a blonde doll and she was happy.
It broke my heart.
They were children he never loved,
Now such curiosities
To the new wife and I was in exile.
I heard the princess say of my daughter,
Is she not cute as a little doll?
In my life I slipped from queen to pawn.
There was no more belonging.
I was the bear who wandered out of her den to find
The land changed.
The wolf mother trying to protect her small ones
As they were being smoked out.
Recently I wept so hard
They took me to the little house
That they call isolation chamber.
They don’t know I like it in there.
I like the silence.
The way I hear my own heart beat
And remember I am alive.
The way I can dream of the green world I came from
The waters flowing,
The ocean nights when the shining nautilus came to the surface.
Sometimes it is hard to dream when women are crying.
It is hard to breathe in any chamber where nothing is green.
They know I long to be outdoors in the lush green of the island,
Hearing the sound of waves and wind, to see
I cannot live in the darkness of these rooms.
I only dwell here
In this chambered building.
There is not a word for jail in our language.
When someone goes wrong we send them away.
I was the sent-away woman.
I was sent from the man
Who wanted power more than love.
I think of that word, power, and what it means.
It means you feed your people, you help the world.
I never understood what else there was to it
But I watched its struggles daily, its games.
He was a man like in their Bible.
He wrestled angels.
In the end the angels won, or maybe lost.
It all confuses me.
When he saw me watching my children,
He called my girl and took her inside to her chambers.
He held the shoulder of her dress.
He did not touch her hand or lift her.
I saw his shadow behind him, from the light.
I know what lives in shadows.
There is a shadow of every woman here, in every cell.
There is darkness in some chamber of every heart.
When I think of these things
I lose my strength
I could live better in the caves on the hillsides.
Where trees are bent by the wind.
Where crystals form, slowly, so slowly,
Growing with each drop of water
To meet one another one day.
Time does this to all of us in some way.
But in here, it is hard being in a world with so little light
And I am one who needs to have my hands in the earth,
Planting, searching through earth and clay
And once I even loved the caves underground
Where I would find the minerals of life
But then I had the freedom to walk
In the wide circle of sunlight
In any place I wished.