In the Garden of Answers by Merri Ukraincik
If God with one breath
molded me out of rib and clay
into a mother among the gladioli,
though a paler flower with parts less regal –
sinew and soft-petaled hands
pistil and rotating mechanisms –
why push me against the thorns
of soiled failure, the weeds of which confound
their elbows up into my throat
until I am not sure what to make of
this growth so tall and unrecognizable?
Why, when motherhood
means to garden Your garden,
do You not respond to me when I call out,
entangled among the baptisia and the boxwood?
You pretend instead, I think, not to see me,
my colors dimmed over time,
milkless breasts weighed down
like rain-soaked peonies on their branches.
You darken the sun, hide the hose,
leave me to confront the dandelions on my own,
to slither like a worm, unseeing,
only my heart to guide me,
when You know better than I
that love is hardly enough
to nurture a plant the way it needs to thrive.
Though You say nothing to answer
the mumbling of my morning prayers –
silence is Your jam,
You never do –
I remain unguarded, open-lipped,
willing to show my truths,
even during casual meditations on the coffee
I drink in the garden in the late afternoon,
where I listen (yet, still) in the yawn of a breeze
or the swish of a leaf
for Your belated reply.
For I am not without the hope or faith
that the strangest things
might make a sudden appearance,
flourishing out of the blue –
maybe a rosebush planted long ago
that has not blossomed since
or a seed blown across the subdivisions of suburbia
that has found a new home here.
Your no might come in the scrape of
a dried branch against my ankle.
Or in the hush of a perfumed lilac
I may well hear You say,
Here I am.
You do not tend this sacred ground alone.
Merri Ukraincik is a writer whose work has appeared in Tablet, Lilith, Hevria, and the Forward, among others publications. She is the author of I Live. Send Help: 100 Years of Jewish History in Images from the JDC Archives (New York, 2014).