.
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A mother sings to her infant,
Most beautiful in all the world, and you stand helpless.
Wind outside the window,
looking in with shackled ankles, wrists.
Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.
Yet you, too, had a mother. Had two sisters.
A photo shows the bone structure's slow shifting:
your face, small, blurred with something almost sorrow,
peers between them.
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~ Jane Hirshfield
from After
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