CRADLE SONG
MOTHERS
AND DAUGHTERS SINGING
Karen
disappears again.
Something
from another place
has
called her. When I find her
maybe
I will find
what
she has found. This happens
when
Karen wanders
partially
lost—
I
am learning to trust it.
Here
she is in a cradle
by
herself, listening
to
singing from a cradle room.
Cradle
of Language
the
quiet sign says.
This
is Karen
in
the cradle by herself
listening
to mothers sing
to
their children, listening
to
children sing
to
their mothers
wrapped
in song-love
mother-love.
Karen never heard
her
mother sing to her. Karen,
mother
and daughter. She had
a
mother, but it wasn’t her mother—
that
mother was taken from her.
These
mothers sharing cradle songs
with
Karen, with children,
are
her sisters,
and
they are the sisters of song.
Cradled
as we are—
museum-cradled
as it were,
receiving
what has been taken away,
when
I find Karen
I
find the song others have lost
finding
the song in Karen,
song
in others, and she brings me
to
song and to others gathered singing.
They
are all here and they aren’t.
The
mothers she listens to
mother
her, as do the singing children
who
are also her mother and sisters.
When
I sit with them here
pulling
a telephone from my pocket
they
are singing to all of us.
We
listen over and over
the
singing mothers and daughters
singing
to all of us.
Jim
Bodeen
Royal
Canadian Museum
Victoria,
B.C.
Canada
Yakima,
Washington
28
November--11 December 2018
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