Bedded in the waters of my belly,
do you feel the car lurching
through daub and wattle alleys,
winding from the ancient city
to the call of morning prayer?

Do you sense my muscles stiffen,
my breath seize at missiles bristling
from mounds of rock?
Men with shoulder guns gawk,
bark us through the Jordan check point.

Blood-red heat swallows the car.
Bedouin mothers stand beyond the road
in black on orange embroidered dresses,
black tents tied to rock like spiders.
My arms cradle you inside me.

Does your heart race as our truck
hurls through a crevice in sheer cliffs
hidden from starlight, out into a limestone valley?
Rose-orange moon illumines caves
carved in valley walls like ghosts.

You curl inside me in our room—
a cave where Nabataen mothers
hid their children, safe from Romans.
Mothers shed their waters here
in homes hidden in stone.

Do you feel me quiver in the morning chill?
I squeeze sweet loquat down my throat,
eyes smarting in winds barbed with sand.
Our mule lumbers along the valley,
you swaying inside my belly.

Daughter, after you emerge from your soft cave,
will you recall the missiles, bristling spiders, ghost
valley, loquats, orange-rose stones?
Will you carry this moonlight in your bones?

Catherine Cobb Morocco

In Bellowing Ark, July/August 2006

Under our boots, lichen smears the boulders
crimson, giant coals smoldering. Gulls
sweep around this island planet. Seas glimmer,
radiate into air.

Here, you tell me, scatter my ashes here.
But where do think you’ll be as I unlock
my hand, release your ruins over headlands—
feathers drifting down cliffs
into the roil?

Will you dissolve, forever quiet
in ribbons of foam unraveling
beyond the crushing surf?
Or will you prowl the starry hillside
near my cabin, rustling the red wygelia,
blazing mist through cranked, darkened
windows, scattering my pens?

Speak to me. Say you won’t return
a mad mewing gull, unblinking,
one of the violent rude.
Spill like blood from icy crevices in May.
Survive this lichen, this stone.

Catherine Cobb Morocco

Atlanta Review, Fall/Winter 2006