She knows how.
Maybe she knows because of the light and the shadow, up where she picked the flowers and bits of my heart and then clutched the drooping heads in her fingers the long way home, her brothers and her all drowsing in the sleep after waves and wind and sand.
Maybe when I shook out half the beach carried home in the towels and she looked through the bags of soggy socks and gritty swimsuits, praying please God, please and finally found her stone, shore-gem, in the toe of her crock with the hole in it.
Maybe because of the slide of the sun later when I slid her under under patchwork, and it was my face that she clutched, me old petals brought to face for the inhaling.
But really, I haven’t the foggiest idea when or how she really knows such things; maybe it is one of those things that only children rightly know and the longer we spin here, we forget, us dizzy from the crazed orbit.
I didn’t know that she knew how, when I turned out the light and she called for me…
“You sleep here with me? Just for a little bit?” She pulls me, arms around the neck, into her pillow, and I acquiesce to the potion of her. It’s good to lie down, tucked in by the child. She strokes my cheek with the palm of her hand and sings to me, lullaby to mama-doll drifting off.
“You are the greatest, the greatest…” How in four years did we invert, me the held one sleeping to song? “You are the greatest, you are, you are, you are….”
Oh Child, thinking this of your mama. Do I tell you that the greatest don’t flash their smiles across glossy front covers, don’t have daily six digit traffic, don’t have their names known to anyone but the mailman and their mother, have no followers except for the dog and maybe a child who tracks them down in the washroom.
Do I tell you that the greatest come for the dirty water and scrubbing of heels and the grit between the toes, that the greatest pluck feathers straight from their breast and lay bits of their bleeding selves down, that the greatest come for the dying.
Do I tell her that there’s only one way you can tell the greatest? By the the way they’ve been beaten and pulverized and bloodied in the long sacrifice…
But I don’t have to. Because her swaying abruptly stops. She sits stock straight up in bed, drops my head like a rock from her arms.
Then she turns, anxious. Patting turns to slapping and she begs, “Wake up, Mama, wake up!”
I open my eyes to find her big blues filling mine. Her nose nearly touches mine when she whispers it.
“Sorry, Mama, sorry. You’re not the greatest.” Oh Child, I know it.
“Only God is the greatest.” She knows it. Forget Idols on reality shows and celebrities on checkout racks and ministries on the cutting edge. Only God is the greatest. What do we know about the nail and the altar? Maybe only the pastor being beaten in a jail cell in China…
She caresses.
“But I still love you. You can be just a little bit great, okay?”
Only if I lay life down on the rough bark, Child, become ever lower.
But I say nothing and let her sing me to sleep. Because I know she already knows.
Lord God, the way up is further down and You know it. Give me a Cross and make me know it.
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