wildscape. literary journal

How to Bulletproof a Mother’s Prayer
by Svetlana Litvinchuk

The news reports on children gunned down by other children. Bullets fall 
from the sky like tiny seeds, making punctures in the earth to grow the opposite 
of life. Look at us still learning how to make nothing out of something. Life 
is a gun chamber’s lucky spin. The fruit of this planet is housed in the husk 
of one word: senseless. A world where an entire life can be erased like chalk 
marks on a blackboard, like an algebra equation that never results in wholeness. 
Is the Earth not one big mother weeping for her children? My pockets are filled 
with holes that spill seeds to cover the scars of loss. I call the flowers that trail 
behind me motherhood. I braid grasses, harvest tiny twigs with sprouting buds 
to weave a nest to house a prayer that can’t be crushed. I surround it with my wings 
to deflect the rain, guard my precious egg, become a door at lockdown against 
the backdrop of the morning sun. Inside a backpack, I tuck a love note 
with instructions for how to play dead. I count how long I can keep the outside 
outside. Spring is almost here and already so many seeds are drowning.

about the author // Svetlana Litvinchuk