Kathryn Knight Sonntag
As a Mother
I lay on my side
in the cool of our maple.
Your small body balances
against the curve of my hip.
I speak to you and hear
myself as if from across a room—
a phenomenon of postpartum—
I never desired to be a symbol,
but since the Feminine Divine
brought up your soft round
warmth from my depths
crawling on my chest to coo and sigh, I
am one working prism of Her endless
blinking body.
So my voice is your sacred pole
holding up the sky.
It parts from my frame, leaving
Earth, to collapse
space and time—and returns here
to the grass, to
the soft pink
of dusk.
The Mother’s “om”
moves around your twists of bone
and muscle, then further
back to the shadowy
chambers of deeper knowing
each smaller than the one before, spiraling
toward the final and the first—
the holy of holies.
I never asked to be the center,
the Eternal Tree,
a venus belly,
etched. But as your sweet body
latches to my breast, I
am Eve, the sun of my son—
who will carry the tree through himself
when he multiplies
and replenishes the earth.
Kathryn Knight Sonntag is a landscape architect and planner in Salt Lake City. Her poems have appeared in Shades: The University of Utah's Literary & Art Magazine, Wilderness Interface Zone, previously in Young Ravens Literary Review and forthcoming in Exponent II. She is currently working on a collection of poems about women's experiences as sacred symbols.
As a Mother
I lay on my side
in the cool of our maple.
Your small body balances
against the curve of my hip.
I speak to you and hear
myself as if from across a room—
a phenomenon of postpartum—
I never desired to be a symbol,
but since the Feminine Divine
brought up your soft round
warmth from my depths
crawling on my chest to coo and sigh, I
am one working prism of Her endless
blinking body.
So my voice is your sacred pole
holding up the sky.
It parts from my frame, leaving
Earth, to collapse
space and time—and returns here
to the grass, to
the soft pink
of dusk.
The Mother’s “om”
moves around your twists of bone
and muscle, then further
back to the shadowy
chambers of deeper knowing
each smaller than the one before, spiraling
toward the final and the first—
the holy of holies.
I never asked to be the center,
the Eternal Tree,
a venus belly,
etched. But as your sweet body
latches to my breast, I
am Eve, the sun of my son—
who will carry the tree through himself
when he multiplies
and replenishes the earth.
Kathryn Knight Sonntag is a landscape architect and planner in Salt Lake City. Her poems have appeared in Shades: The University of Utah's Literary & Art Magazine, Wilderness Interface Zone, previously in Young Ravens Literary Review and forthcoming in Exponent II. She is currently working on a collection of poems about women's experiences as sacred symbols.