Is the sound of my loud carrying life a knell
far across your small ocean? Do you share
the secret that the months keep hidden there?
Is my past-filled pregnancy a hungry shell?
I think I will turn metal, like a bell,
so you can clapper my voice out, to where
the silent memories will echo care
and speak again. We’ll sound our double spell,
swinging; we’ll swing back then, to forgive
my mother’s curve around the angry past—
and then her mother’s. They were smothered, bound
and quiet. But we’ll speak, and you will live,
tolling and striking what we know at last,
until you ring aloud with newer sounds.

First collected in Eve (Story Line Press, 1997, Reprinted by Carnegie Mellon University Press Contemporary Classics Poetry Series, 2011)