Baskadia

The word still foreign on my tongue,

A swift, crisp swoosh, mimicking

The pulse of life. Last eve, my unbound girls

Chided, "It's not wife-sanctioned," they said,

Of a comrade's wanderlust. Their gazes

Vaulted skyward, then danced away, fleeting

As youth. Wife—does it echo a vocation?

"I desire a wife," declared the famed advocate,

One to launder, press, patch, renew—

A term, effortlessly morphed to 'servant.'

A wife to tend, mend, cherish, heed.

Housewife, fishwife, scorned or adored,

But what of the one lost in dawn's embrace,

Tea forgotten, kettle's cry rising sharp

As a locomotive's call, she who weeps

With the daybreak, she who rends the soil

And bathes in sorrow, she who yearns

To love you, yet stumbles in the act,

She who refuses to be lessened

By her longing to be wholly thine.