Cynthia Robinson Young

POETRY

I Still Remember the Shadows

He leads me through the valley of the shadow of death
— Psalm 23:4*

I almost died once —
My unborn baby wanted to take me with her, our blood together
flowing like the creek water than runs through
my neighborhood, a gentle stream, but moving nonetheless,
red like the Nile River in the book of Exodus when Moses cursed it,
but this river was flowing
out of me.

It was my husband who got me
to leave my placid acceptance, resigned to embrace
my sentence, to stay in my bathroom
as the toilet was transforming itself
into a deathbed. What moved me was
the panic in his eyes,
the pleading in his voice.

In Emergency, I was content to lay sideways
close my eyes,
and Fetal Curl, claiming the bench as my gurney,
while he begged
The Guardians of the ER to triage me.

I was close enough to death to see the shadow of
the grandmother who had just passed, waiting for me.
In the ambulance that raced me to a better equipped facility,
I could suddenly, hear my 3rd grade class reciting
the 23rd Psalm, and I whispered 
the words our teacher taught us
when we memorized it and I was eight:

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want …
By still waters, He leadeth me.

The doctor who held my hand mistook my mumbling for delirium,
and leaned in close enough to breathe my air,
to assure and to comfort, to let me know
I was not abandoned, leaving this life alone.

I don’t remember how I made it —
just that Savannah didn’t. I came back home
empty armed, my breasts aching with loss,
my womb, once an incubator,
an empty tomb.

* This is a paraphrase of Psalm 23:4. Bible version unknown.

Cynthia Robinson Young lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She is the author of the chapbook, Migration (2018). Her work has appeared in journals and magazines, including Grist, The Ekphrastic Review, Radix, The Writer’s Chronicle, and in the anthology, Dreams for a Broken World (2022). Her author website is cynthiarobinsonyoung.com.

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Image: “Stained glass window (Psalm 23) in All Saints Church, Saughall” photo by David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Modified by Veronica McDonald.

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