What You Would Not Wish

What You Would Not Wish

Opal Rose was already speaking her first words

when you came, thirty-six weeks, too early for the Shire—

a gardener before you saw soil.

Three days past Christmas, you opened your eyes

to a world that would ask too much of your lungs.

RSV, four months old, a hospital’s sterile light.

Pneumonia’s gray tide pulling you under.

Two weeks. Then two weeks. Then my arms were empty.

I tied your lion to the crib.

He guards a kingdom of no one

while I walk among the living, hollow-hearted,

carrying the shape of what is not here.

No first date, no prom with a corsage you’d pick yourself.

No high school desk with your name carved in the corner.

No first job, no car on blocks with Dad,

no teaching your hands the language of engines.

No first drive, knuckles white on the wheel.

No wedding band, no child of your own

to frighten you with love and break you open.

All your unwound years lie curled in my chest—

a phantom limb I will never stop nursing.

After you, life did not stop.

It came in stubborn waves:

Liliana Rosalyn, who grew to call herself Li,

Theodin Dean with his quiet thunder,

and Raistlin Scott—born at twenty-five weeks,

a breath of defiance the day after my birthday.

They are here. They are real.

They fill my arms with hungry, living weight.

And still, Ohrin, still—

you are the hollow at the center of every embrace,

the silence beneath every laugh.

A mother can hold a galaxy of children

and still orbit a black hole

no light escapes.

I have learned this grief will unmake you

or force you to build a strange, scarred whole.

It has taken some of my relationships like a flood takes bridges,

left me standing on the far bank,

waving at faces I used to know.

I would not wish this on my worst enemy—

not the silent house at 2 a.m.,

not the way joy becomes a foreign language,

not the way your name, Samwise,

cracks me open and stitches me shut

in the same breath.

Somewhere, my Hobbit son, you tend a garden just past seeing.

You carry the Shire in your pocket,

and the lion I tied still watches the door you never walked out of.

I am your mother, Li’s daughter—

named by the poet who knew how to hunger for the gone—

and I am mother to Li, who walks beside me now.

I hold a phantom limb and call it Love,

while the living and the dead

share the same breath in my chest.