Child, you untwisted this struggle
to speak. I lay
on my back at the beach,
hands pressed to my belly.
Water lapped my legs
with shells and leaping fish.
I felt you move

inside me
for the first time.
Your legs, your arms
braille
stuttering across my palm.
I lay against the warmed back of sand
as you lay against mine.
Water surrounded me too.
It seemed like the hum of the ocean

stopped
and I slipped into another time.
As a small child, I was drawn
day after day to the dining room,
to its circle of mirrors, one on each wall.
I would pull over a stool, climb up,
see myself repeated infinitely.
I would touch the glass
wherever it held my faces.

At the ocean, my blood lit
with you inside me,
I was able to see
what I had only sensed:
that the I that I am
is a we.
In my infinite mirror
I am a caravan of people
traveling sand together
through time.
I am the sweat
of a stranger’s child in fever,
the sleepless eyes of a friend
packing her son’s bag for war,
the ancient chant of a rabbi
uncovering the mirrors of the dead.
Their pain mixes like blood.
Child, I have been a foreigner
on this shore.
I have lost my mother tongue.
Yet sometimes
it comes floating back briefly
not in words
but in moments like this
bodies within body
unslipping the knots of silence.