Villanelle for My Daughter
(Three Days After the Birth)

by Jean Hillabold

Like an amoeba lit up by the sun,
I take my form from nature's boundless light.
I am all women; therefore I am none.

I am your source, and you have only one.
That makes me look as powerful and bright
As a queen spider lit up by the sun.

Those who can see through this have fought and won
A struggle to achieve the clearest sight.
I am all women; therefore I am none.

Your life will end, because it has begun.
Your little life glows like a star at night,
Like a small planet lit up by the sun.

Seedling, these brutal facts we may not shun
Grind us to nothing with their thoughtless might.
I am all women; therefore I am none.

What gives our Mother strength leaves me undone;
Nature, not I, can spread her wings in flight.
Like an amoeba lit up by the sun,
I am all mothers; therefore I am none.

© 2006 by Jean Hillabold

 
 


About the Author

Jean Hillabold was born long ago and far away, and has been trying to launch a literary career almost since then. She immigrated to mid-Canada from the U.S. as a teenager with her family, and won a major award in a national student writing contest in her last year of high school. In her twenties and thirties, she wrote doggedly for small, leftist and feminist publications before writing a volume of lesbian fiction which was published by a one-woman press in 1988. In the late 1990s, she responded to requests from friends that she "come to the point" (write explicitly about the sex which is hinted at in her lesbian fiction), and thus was born the porn writer who has had stories of all sexual flavors in over forty anthologies under her thin-disguise pen name.

 

 
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