Mother

Hilda Hurtado

Mother,
in two years life stripped me of everything
until it took you too.

It was patient. It was cruel. It was insatiable.
Unrelenting.
And in the end it left nothing in my hands.

Now I don’t know who I am without your name to summon me;
I don’t know how to breathe when the origin is gone
and the world turns barren.

I write, and I don’t know whether the word will return to me
or whether it went with you, weary,
leaving me this numb tongue.

I have no reason to go back
to a country that doesn’t want me.
Everything feels ill-omened;
belonging, a closed door.

Because you were home
and my world was left without a centre.

Only one image remains: emptiness.
A blurred history in the folds of my memory.
And I…
uninhabited.