Heartwood

She was the trunk, our Mom,

thick as faith, unbending.

A single olive heartwood

rooted deep in Sicilian soil,

even here, across oceans of asphalt and English.

Her laugh, an uproar in the leaves,

the loud wind that made us shimmer.

She wasn’t just the center

she was the gravity

that held each branch from breaking away.

Roots fed on loyalty and garlic,

on the salt of her hands,

on the warmth that rose like prayers

from her kitchen window.

A trunk so thick

no storm could shudder.

We knew no other shape but whole.

And then…

the sear.

The sky split, and so did we.

Lightning found her heartwood,

a single, screaming crack

through sap and time

and everything we called forever.

Smoke rose.

The air tasted of iron and ending.

A gaping, raw, and smoking line

down the body that had held us all.

Then the silence,

the deafening after.

We stood, bare-limbed,

the wind still moving

though she was gone.

Now, we are a definitive before and an after,

separated by a wound.

And I,

the oldest daughter,

stand at the edge of splintered wood,

hands raw on the bark,

trying to remember how to breathe.

Yet the roots still grip.

They demand we live.

They pulse with memory, with garlic, with grief.

Growth now is a begrudging thing,

a knotted branch twisting sideways from the scar.

Life no longer climbs; it crawls.

We grow around the hollow, not from the heart.

My leaves are smaller,

their edges curled,

reaching for a sun that feels wrong.

Still…

we reach.

This is the shape of after.

This is the way we carry on.

The wound becomes the weather.

The scar becomes the song.

And even now,

beneath it all,

the roots whisper her name.