You belong to the world

by Carrie Fountain

as do your children, as does your husband.

It’s strange even now to understand that

you are a mother and a wife, that these gifts

were given to you and that you received them,

fond as you’ve always been of declining

invitations. You belong to the world. The hands

that put a peach tree into the earth exactly

where the last one died in the freeze belong

to the world and will someday feed it again,

differently, your body will become food again

for something, just as it did so humorously

when you became a mother, hungry beings

clamoring at your breast, born as they’d been

with the bodily passion for survival that is

our kind’s one common feature. You belong

to the world, animal. Deal with it. Even as

the great abstractions come to take you away,

the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second

come back to the world to which you belong,

the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells

forever, forever going through their changes,

as they have been since you were less than

anything, simple information born inside

your own mother’s newborn body, itself made

from the stuff your grandmother carried within hers

when at twelve she packed her belongings

and left the Scottish island she’d known—all

she’d ever known—on a ship bound for Ellis Island,

carrying within her your mother, you, the great

human future that dwells now inside the bodies

of your children, the young, who, like you,

belong to the world.