Don gloves before touching the art.
You’ll get rust on your hands and oil on the rock,
ruin it when you work into indented stone.
The handprint etched there lures you alone.
Sage smells like the desert, blistered white as bone.
Someone else had their hands here. Were you a shaman
a midwife a healer or did this babe with the feathered
carvings slip out through two thighs of your own?
A child who arrives feet first, washed in the sacred flow
flowers suckle at the light, divine insight acquire,
Silver scrapes to sketch a spirit grown.
The artifacts are brushed, dust lifted and flown,
made of coppered earth and granite desire,
falling to the ground where mothers groan.
A poet for thirty years, a mother for twenty-one, a midwife for ten years, a teacher for seven, Sarah Jean Carter is a lover of granite, sandstone, honeybees and humans, currently in the midst of an English MA program at Weber State University and launching people who used to be babies into an uncertain world. Sarah has written poetry for LitStart, Exponent II Online, and a small tribe of nieces and nephews who appreciate her Pokemon-based verse.
