To be a mother is to know pain

on a scale so exquisite, it becomes craving,

it becomes moon pulling tide

morning and evening, as if water

could rise out of its bed and join the sky.

But there is that crucial distance

that the moon’s grasp cannot traverse,

though her fingers outstretch 

and she imagines she can reach—

and that is the way of it, the intense longing

for the piece of her that left

to seek its own way, that made her hollow,

grasping for water but only finding handfuls of sand.