Wet Nurse's Song

163 Wet Nurse's Song The sacrament of milk, mother to child, is the long patience that is faith, and needs no transubstantiation to become the actual body or blood that sustains and saves and grows us to our full bloom. The medievals thought milk a kind of blood after all, and who knew along the ages that it was women who carried the chalice inside them—how to be more Christlike by the deeds we are given to do, literally feed the hungry. I want to be close to God and I feel him there in the regeneration of colostrum and milk coming in like a gentle rain, letting down into the calm cooing and rocking of the just born fresh from a heaven I don’t understand but know gets reenacted in my devotion, the harsh world quieted, put on pause. The result of this worship, this love with the man who makes my body quiver with a desire that began the world itself, how that can create infinitely in either direction. The cosmos open themselves and the moon glares hot and blinding in my window. I only want to read this world, this joy, not as a narrative text to construct and deconstruct, but in the same way my grandmother read the stars to find her way to me, an intuitive navigation that shepherds each moment, each now, into its golden permanency. To know that my milk can suffice, grow any child, a blessing beyond fruitful, which has been given to me freely by virtue of human passion and at no cost, just as this, my life, has been given. Elizabeth Powell 164 Ecotone: reimagining place I do not ask for these things perhaps they ask for me. That is what desire is, God calling to be fed, so he will feed us. Let me hear all the sounds longing and love bring, let me hear the suckle and breath of it, let me know I am not alone, as I know it by the hum of the wind in the trees, the way it sounds like the Beloved’s breath and heartbeat. ...