In My Mother's Womb

from Words Like Love (audio book) by Tanaya Winder

	/

Streaming + Download

Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app.

Purchasable with gift card

name your price
Buy the Full Digital Album

lyrics

in my mother’s womb

i.

i came into this world
incomplete, born with a hole
in my heart. it happened

in my mother’s womb.
doctors have a name for it:
call it congenital cardiovascular defect.

my grandmother says it’s the moon
emptied of its many faces. it is against nature.
creation has a will of its own.

or is it a pact from the past
made long ago? it happened
in my mother’s womb, the blood

vessels closest to my heart
didn’t develop the way nature
or the Creator intended.

when the doctors say hereditary,
my grandmother responds
ancestrally – in prayer, songs gifted

to her like birds. my mother and i do not know
the words. but, when grandmother sings
she is calling on horses to run in on clouds

to protect us, to save us.

ii.

long ago, there was a man
who loved my great great great grandmother.
the love connected two people, two

spirits so deeply it shook the earth.
i imagine it, the way it should have lasted
long after the moon. yet, he left her.

his leaving made
this hole passed down
in my grandmother’s grandmother’s womb.

credits

from Words Like Love (audio book), released December 17, 2015

license

about

Tanaya Winder Albuquerque, New Mexico

Tanaya Winder is a writer, educator, motivational speaker, and spoken word poet from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She grew up on the Southern Ute Indian reservation and attended college at Stanford University where she earned a BA in English. She has a MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. You can follow her on Twitter at @tanayawinder ... more