will she remember her name

©Paulette C Turcotte

will she remember her name?

will the child speak?

will innocence hold?

if the child wakens

if you whisper your secret into the night

if the night whispers back

if you toss the bones into the fire

if a single life weighs less than a feather

what is innocence?

how does it hold?

curious birds

flutter about my head

my shoulders, my face,

a secret hungers for words

what of the sleeping child?

what of the cold bottomless sorrow tree

each of us is nailed to?

what of the divine ghost

hiding behind the ancestral tree?

as we watch from behind the glass,

air brushed out of the photo

what happened in the garden?

what hunger? what cry?

what tree? what divide?

what woman? what apple?

what of the sleeping child?

the cry of a bird,

the shape of a heart

an invisible form, a ghost

at the top of the Christmas tree

where the star would have been

adeste fideles, come, come,

what of the sleeping child

in the well-worn sepia photo of us with our open mouths

pressed against the glass,

from the other side?

whatever happened in the garden?

what of the sleeping child?

will she waken?

will she speak?

will she remember her name?