My blood-gift spills down my arm from the needle and soaks my jeans. And a cylinder of my blood falls onto the floor and shatters. My blood is heavy in my jeans - thick on the floor, mixed with tiny shards of glass. My blood is wasted, thick and shattered on the floor.
My blood pours out of my mouth. A pitched baseball returns, faster and heavier. It hits me square in the jaw, creating this red waterfall, this screaming child, this mother trying to silence her child as she silences her own fear. Does a mother forget?
After I fall, my blood fills my mother's hands as she holds my small and broken face, my soon to be swollen and death-etched face. Does a mother fail to remember?
My wife's blood, my daughter's blood, I do not know which, splatters across the tiny body as the umbilical cord is cut. It is crimson on a canvas of whitest white. Does a father forget?
I watch the circumcision. I hold him and whisper to him of a father's love. But the screams are real and lamb-like, stuttering out from his tiny chest, bleating out over his trembling tongue. Surely You are a Bridegroom of blood to me!
I hold my daughter to my chest as she bleeds into my shirt and screams. I then hold her down as the crooked needle threads in and out of her quivering chin, only inches from my face. Her breath is my breath; we breathe as one. Does a father fail to remember?
Oh, that it were my blood. Let it be my blood.
My blood for her; My blood for him. This one and that one, they are Mine. Do I fail to remember? I hear their cries.
Ah! The splendor of it: We sing and we dance. We bleed. You are life, and our springs are in You.
3 comments:
Maybe it's goofy to tell you, but I cried at the post. I remember! My sons cries, my daughter's fear, my husband's screams at the loss of his mother. Oh, that it were mine.
Beautifully said. Thank you.
I just experienced my first "bloodshed" from my son- smashed face first into the entertainment center--- the guilt has overwhelmed me - so I resorted back to nursing him- (enduring the pain of now SEVEN teeth -four of which are coming in at the same time) to ease his pain from the fall---- the cut was small, but then again so is he.
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