i wake up to the dripping tears of my mother.

& it dawns on me that my mother’s daughter

has no inheritance in the house of stillbirth;

where vagitus gathers no crowd in the shape 

of muezzin’s call in the theatre. unholy cells

brewing unholy red sea surging waves between 

her thighs, ajar. & in the theory of midwifery,

the doctor says: pregnancy is subject to morgue

 where the dangling stethoscope passes

votes of no confidence in the veins of a woman

in form of binary codes clocking from one to zero.

or whereof the laboratory fails auscultation to 

record another Lazarus. thereof, the joy of

motherhood is blowing in the wind. & so we swaddle teeth-tight & dumbstruck from morning till mourning. mother, strapping baby’s kit with frown home as if anti-funeral lies on the body denied bathroom for weeks. as if she’s allergic to baby boom. at this juncture,

the dog does not recognize the master whose buttock rakes dust at the corridor; the same way the master forgets the name of his belching dog in the face of the funeral. the flowers, too lose sway with the whirlwind at the old façade. consolation is, seeing another’s wound times two excruciating than grief you hawk as a teen. across the blood bank, a small black sarcophagus is swallowing another twin, slowly.

& little by little, I too forget every tiniest euphoria,

on the dining table. because at home,

there are many thorns forgotten in the mouth 

of an old  woman whose only help is to weep, or sweep dead leaves atop the graveside of her grandchild. ’cause at the break of tears of a mother, the house shakes, & submerges into a different tanks of tears of unified planet. 

& so we gather around grandmother counting loss like census. & if you ask: define grief? 

i will tell you; grief is a constituency a woman rules

total supremacy. even little girls start accumulating the first time a water pot breaks in the mouth of 

the lake. hold on. tomorrow,  i will tell you 

more how the ghosts identify with the owners 

whimpering in the dark like night owls.

until then, take my notes of cymbal: 

ozoemena, Ada, ozoemena. trust me, there’s always a consolation prize for a mother whose fetus disowns at dilation in 2050, says the next ministry of health care reform system.