Weeping Rock
dumque rogat, pro qua rogat, occidit. *
— Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI. 301
Now Niobe can only watch
as fat-breasted robins dress a nest above her head,
remembering the smear of red birth
on her thighs. Punished
for banal maternal pride, having bragged over rosé
to Latona
of the soccer practice & Spanish lessons
filling their family evenings,
Niobe stands
alone in her apartment, seven daughters &
seven sons lost, her
husband a clumsy suicide. She
can only watch & hunger
as the sugar cube city dissolves
around her, the still
percolating coffee machine
mimicking her husband’s snore.
As old girlfriend Latona’s children overcame
her own, boys then girls shredded
limb from limb, Niobe’s lips moved
slow
for absolution, searching for a prayer
that might soften the minds
of Apollo & Diana, but in her asking
those for whom she asked
were felled.
* “and while asking she for whom she asked was killed” (my translation).
Annick MacAskill is the author of No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the JM Abraham Award, and Murmurations (Gaspereau Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad, including Arc, Canadian Notes & Queries, Canthius, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Room, The Stinging Fly, Versal and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. A settler of French and Scottish ancestry, she lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. More: annickmacaskill.com