Primula

I have not dreamed this flower.
It just is.
In the midst of pandemic compliance
we are still part of spring in the north,
or autumn in the south.

As I near grandmotherhood for a second time, I continue exploring my legacy.
My father used to say there were a lot of people walking around Toronto
with the ass out of their pants because they didn’t get the trump out.

One day, aged, he woke from a nap in a wistful state and spoke of his dream:
a little sow in heat that he is leading on a string.
He walks it to the market downtown but just can’t do it, can’t enter that space.

He is speaking in an Irish accent with a softness and a fondness I have never seen.
I research the original occupant of our old house:
a butcher from County Tyrone, once the town’s mayor.
I find old pictures of the downtown Square
where there used to be a market on the grounds,
long before my father’s days here.
Carriages, fences, long dresses.

My hurry up legacy is the message that violence is so expensive.

Right now the sundering at birth is not so much moving from breathing water to air
as entering a world where one is made to chose between the mother and the father.
Moment one, and even before, the beliefs of our ancestors and their ancestors fill us.
Ancient systems made people things.
Boy children were made things that would own things.
Children and women were made things to be owned.
Men as things were made to trade people as things, made to corral allies,
made to make families tribes of deals made and broken,
empires of loyalty and enslavement.

The first breaths are of the air filled with the idea of people as things.
The first breaths are filled with the fallacy that one must chose love for the mother
or love for the father,
fallacy because it is not love in either case when people are treated as things.
This is the sundering, the system of the false bottom choice.

We are all born in the middle of the story of things.
This story keeps us blind to the story.
The heart of the child knows there is a false bottom story,
but needs others who will get to the bottom
to be freed from the empire of things.
The emperor has no clothes,
and the energy of the people goes either into trying so hard
to believe his clothes are as fine as he says,
or into trying to find others who, like the child,
will say he is naked and foolish.

A house of cards.
The world turned into a game of cards.
Getting the trump out is only playing the game.
Taking the little sow to market is part of waking up in the middle of a story
and not recognizing the ancestors’ voices.
The stories fill the air of birthing rooms.
To heal the wound from belief that we are things,
we need to see we are the ancestors telling stories.
The new story needs to serve the child, not the empire.

The first flower flowers in the north or south at its season.
It just is being itself.
This writing is more than a trump card.
It is a quiet trumpet like the opening of a primula in tune with the coming of a child.
It is a child pointing to vulnerable flesh that thought it was invincible,
that thought it was separate from nature and was a thing,
but is a being.