An Abortion

Do not bathe her in blood, the little one whose sex is undermined, she drops leafy across the belly of black sky and her abyss has not that sweetness of the March wind. Her conception ached with the perversity of nursery rhymes, she was a shad a snake a sparrow and a girl's closed eye. At the supper, weeping, they said let's have her and at breakfast: no. Don't bathe her in tears, guileless, beguiled in her peripheral warmth, more monster than murdered, safe in all silences. From our tree dropped, that she not wither, autumn in our terrible breath.