Hagar's Second Husband

Because her third son stopped crying
Before his skin dried from her,
She told her husband to burn their pillows
And fill their cusions with sand
“You will love me like the desert,
and your seeds will bloom for a week
but wither when the waters recede.”

Each son withered faster than his older brother
Until her belly was a garden of secrets
She smoothed with hands worn thin by tilling
Her bed of sand, and in quarter-tones she sang
“has any mother loved her children as I have?
Keeping them safe all their life?”

Though her husband burned his knees,
She soothed his abrasions and said
“has any man had as many sons as you?
Thirteen last year, another soon.”
He rolls away to sleep while she lies in the indentation
she calls Makkah, the uncultivated valley.

Hagar has gone mad in her desert:
Every full moon is her spring,
But when there is no moon, she is a pall bearer,
so she bleeds her sons onto her bed and ties up her sheets,
releasing the sand as barchan dunes
for the winds to push west.

Of course her husband leaves her.
What man can join a woman in her madness?
A father is not consoled to know
His sons are legions marching across the rocks
In graceful arcs that spell his name for centuries.