Innocence That Goes

Innocence That Goes, digital art collage

I couldn’t tell you everything I was feeling in the moments proceeding the birth of my daughter because there were so many: love, awe, fear, humility, joy…but I do know that later the next day when I finally got to gaze upon her tiny sleeping body without all the chaos of childbirth and doctors and nurses and the many messages of love and congratulations pouring into mine and my husband’s phones, the thing I felt the most was utter and crippling guilt. Guilt for bringing her to this world, for adding her pure soul to the absolute mess of humanity, and for all the hardship she’s bound to endure in life that I already knew I couldn’t shield or protect her from.

Sweet good child, you are

A white tulip in a tar pit
A fresh snow falling on a battlefield
A lullaby echoing through a house on fire
A lamb at the butcher’s door
A hymn inside a slaughterhouse.
A baptism in polluted water
A Renaissance masterpiece on a crumbling cathedral wall
A moonbeam weeping through prison bars
A beacon of sanguinity in a cemetery
A soft whisper in a room of screams

No blood, no wound, only a quiet vanishing;
innocence that goes like a ghost, like smoke from open hands.
innocence that goes first willingly but unknowingly.
innocence that goes unnoticed until it’s gone.

Sweet daughter, you are sincerity quietly stalked by corruption
The unknowing prey in the savage dark
And it will catch you
Just as it caught me
Just as it catches us all