from Michelle Zacks

A Thousand Comings: Nativity Scene
for M.H. and V.M.

We have secret thunder in our grounded feet.
Comets shoot from our eyes.
Rain falls from our hands.
In the quiet agreement of moonlight,
we wait in the bush.

The night embraces us.
We accept the dark.
We recall the ocean.
We remember this:
the water planet, lightning,
and life from salt and blue-green algae.

Darkness brought us here.
Not light, not star-sign,
but the breaking of branches
and the shifting of sand in the bush.

Three women,
a continuum of color,
watch and wait
in a golden crechè
under a black and blue moon sky.

From the ocean,
generous with eggs,
she turtle enters the solid world
of shifting sand.
Sea turtle, her carapace bears
our ocean planet mud puddle
of salt water and earth.

She comes from before-time,
worlds and worlds ago.
Witness of fire, ice, fire,
and ice again.

Hundreds of eggs laid in the bush.
A thousand comings,
thousands of comings
and millions of years.
Hundreds of babies
waiting to be born.

We women, we three
wait in the bush.
We don't drink the turtle blood,
eat the turtle egg,
pry the shell loose,
we don't yearn for virile stregth.

We watch and we wait.
We wait for what we know will emerge.
We wait for something older than time,
something older than the beginning.