Editor’s Choice

Unborn Offspring

    by Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas

I watch you as you pour your milk each day

or fiddle with your hair, the bits of gray

once honey-blond you wrap behind your ear–

one waning gasp away from being here.

A jaybird with your tree forever filled

of twigs, your needful nest of grass you pilled

to bed this babe, unborn.  Abandoned wings,

ethereal the song a mother sings

no passerine nor failed child unheard

such summoning. More mournful than each word

confessed amid your mother’s half-closed eyes

while overwhelmed with loss. Yet our goodbyes

were cried before my birth. You named it death

although I wait beyond your dying breath.

© 2012  Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a six-time Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee.  She has authored eight chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection of poems: Epistemology of an Odd Girl, newly released from March Street Press.  She is a recent winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook competition for her manuscript “Before I Go to Sleep.”  According to family lore, she is a direct descendent of Robert Louis Stevenson.