When my mother says we will be remembered by what we tried to save

by Chera Hammons

She means young starlings wrapped in kitchen towels, 

orphaned cottontails found in the schoolyard,

splay-foot chicks with legs bound. 

Still-blind kittens, once hungry and crying,

pulled from behind a woodpile. 

The injured goat kid no one else wanted.

The daughter who wanted to name them all. 

My mother’s gift to me when I left home: 

the necklace I wear for luck now 

because my grandmother,

who died when my mother was four,

wore it and had none. My mother, even now,

waits for me in a white room

while I am stitched back into myself,

and hugs too hard, as certain as she has always been 

in her belief that the needle hurts less than the splinter.

That a cup of table salt poured into an old sock 

and microwaved can draw out an ear infection. 

That you might as well try. 

I didn’t realize for a long time that we were reading 

not just books, but birds. That I was learning

to keep looking for what was gone 

as if it would be the last place I looked.

I wish I could speak to my mother before I knew her,

when she was an orphaned girl 

who sat listening to the windy prairie pre-dawn,

the field of stars beginning to fade away,

her cheek against the rising 

and falling ribs of the brown-eyed cow

that breathed mist into the gentle darkness. 

The warm milk that pinged into the pail

as unremarkable as a prayer.

I’d tell her, You were always wanted. 

I want to believe that I am beginning to understand now

the work it takes to live.

All the hurt and the miracle of it.