From Whom

I lived inside her
for months
I cannot remember.

I cannot remember
because I was not yet
the one who would owe.

She kept me in a room
of her own making,

a room I have walked past
a thousand times
without saying thank you.

I learned her face
before her body.

I learned her labor
as a story she sometimes told
in fragments,

the way a person tells
the worst weather
they have survived.

What I owe her
is not gratitude exactly.

It is something older,
it is something more ancient,

a door
I should have
knelt at
long before
I called myself
her child
and meant it.