Brian’s Mother

It was a positive sign and a terrible truth,
A cross the week after, an x made of pink.
All her hopes and dreams were replaced by two lines.
Her destiny lay in the sink.

She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life,
But she knew precisely what she must.
It didn’t matter that she herself was a child
Or whether or not it was just.

All that mattered to her was an image
That sang and laughed inside her soul
Of the tiny unborn child
That had come to make her whole.

Seven months and a ton of vitamins later
She’d painted the bedroom blue
And hung a tiny mobile
And purchased the baby shoes.

All the while she sang and smiled,
And now and then she wept,
Her entire life an accident
That kicked her while she slept.

Thirty days and thirty nights
And the sun rose, orange and gray.
Thirty times more came the morning sun,
Rosy pink, each happy day.

Until arose the sixtieth sun,
And the mother’s sweet sixteen,
And the golden sky brought a bolt of pain,
And the hospital bed was clean.

The doctor came, all dressed in white,
The child’s hair was red.
And the words “his name is Brian”
Were the last her mother said.

And so the girl lived in the blue room
Amidst her mother’s love.
And an angel looks on her daughter Brian
From a happy place above,

And the angel never once considered
Her life to have been a loss.
And she smiles, remembering how she was saved
By that small magenta cross.