Umbilical Shadows

Before memory learned its own face,

I carried impossible longings:
to drift again in the moonlit lagoon beneath my mother's heart,
to hear her blood move through darkness like a herd of red deer crossing water.

I longed for the hush before language,
when every promise was folded inside me like a fern before unfurling;
longed for the weightless trust of a pearl hidden in its shell,
for the forgotten fragrance of first rain falling on unborn fields,
for the secret map my cells once carried like lanterns beneath the sea.

These hungers shimmered around me, silver fish beneath ice,
pulling at the invisible root from which I first flowered.

Yet stranger longings followed:
to outgrow every nest, to become horizon instead of harbor,
to be lifted by uncertainty as a hawk is lifted by a thermal it cannot see.

Each fulfilled yearning loosened another knot of fear;
the cord became not a tether but a river,
not a river but a road of constellations leading outward.

I learned that freedom is love stretched wide enough to include distance,
and that gratitude ripens when we bless the hands we no longer need to hold.

So I carry the sacred thread within me still,
as many American Indian traditions save the umbilical cord as a holy remembrance,
honoring the bond to mother, earth, and spirit while walking freely into one's own becoming.