The Death Wife’s Tale

After nine months,
three hours of labor
and a mile of wandering

Tahlequah gave birth 
in the middle 
of a salted world.

For half an hour,
Tahlequah could look 
into her child’s eyes.

For thirty minutes the child, 
until it became silent, 
was a sacrament to love.

In the inexplicable beauty 
of her death Tahlequah
decided to carry her.

She remembered how 
there was no real grieving 
at her mother’s funeral,

no keening, no collapsing into 
trembling arms, no crying,
just sniffling, shoving back tears

in the insufferable heat of 
a summer’s day, a procession 
through places known and loved,

things  carried on her back 
to this very day.   Burdens 
not meant to be carried alone 

but carried alone— the father
having abandoned them to pursue 
his own drunken vision quest. 

For seventeen days, Tahlequah 
carried her dead child on her back 
a hundred, two hundred miles,

maybe more, until a city grew up
in front of her, crowded and 
full of life, gossiping around her,
taking pictures, writing stories.

Tahlequah imagined processions,
 others walking alongside her,
sharing her grief, sharing the burden.

But all they did was talk and watch this  
mother with dead child walking away until
inside, the streets became dark and empty.

Tahlequah is a species of Orcas, Killer Whales.

This poem is an adaptation into a human myth based on a news story about one Orca mother who grieved her still born child by balancing it on her nose for seven days.