Headdress and Crown for the Daughter of a Dead Immigrant

Headdress and Crown for the Daughter of a Dead Immigrant.

Concerning the daughter of a dead immigrant
Whose mother lives alone, now, in some hut in some jungle
found on a map that is difficult to locate
If you still walk or crawl the world.
Her mother is alive in a Technicolor sense.
She lives without her body but within her daughter.
She whittles figurines of this daughter
Out of fantastic wood and debris from broken glass found on floors
of Countries with Carnivals.
The hut is supported by a statue of her daughter
Wearing the headdress of Three Mary’s:
Maria and Magdalene and Marriage,
Her wood-skin tinged with red,
And sodden with rum
The Mother costumes her in wedding dress and crown
In celebration of having joined the wisdom of spirit to this living young woman
Made in her mother’s likeness.
The walls of the hut also stand wooden with her daughter
And the ceiling shows the moving cinema
of her daughter’s dramatic face
The Mother will not whittle her offspring weeping
She will not whittle for her a single tear
She settles for whittling inside her child-friend, heart-fruit,
a heart so open that it can only be an un-forbidden door
for the universe to enter
and recline in the pulp of its chambers
until the call to carnival and revel
places upon the universes’ illusions about itself
every hanging, menacing and magnificent mask –
with which all shadows in this heart space must genuflect.
The mother declares her daughter’s heart to be a cathedral
And though the mother is without her body,
she is resurrected in the carnival dance of her daughter
she congregates within her brown daughter
calling on her to demand of the world
that her majesty be seen and heard.
It is all her mother can do without a body
because she is now free to travel other gardens of Goddesses and Gods
with a gilded posse
of revelers, brown birds, butterflies, immigrants
and dimming memories
of being once hopeful and human
her belly bulging, burgeoning and blossoming her brilliant brown baby
born with every right to be regal.