"Self Mythology" by Saba Keramati

Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, Passages North, The Margins, and elsewhere. She is the current Poetry Editor at Sundog Lit.

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Self Mythology
 

​I learn and I mourn
for not learning earlier.
 
The mint grew but was not eaten.
A harvest turned to waste.
 
The old brick of this house keeps
the wandering night air cold and inside.
 
I cannot fathom my mother
before she was my mother.
 
What forgiveness is necessary,
for someone doing their best?
 
There is no relief, only the swell
of an inward tide back toward the self.
 
I learn and I mourn.
There is no anger,
 
only truth. Only consequence.
Only: I, gazing at the past
 
of my own body, the shell
of myself melting, meaning I will drip
 
to a future where I am a mother;
am my mother, and all is what she helped create.
 
There is also what we broke.
There is also what we mended.
 
One day, too, my daughter will break
upon the shore, and still
 
she will float back.
I see it endlessly.