In the Last Room of the MoMA Kollwitz Show

We work our way from room to room. 
Women are everywhere, drawings 
of mother after mother – at least to me 
so many seem to be mothers – 

standing in crowds, charcoal eyes dark 
with worry, every gaze frozen in the same 
direction. In some drawings, children 
peer out between arms, like young deer 

who startle when the grown ones do, even 
when they don’t know what threats 
approach. Kollwitz turned to sculpture 
on the eve of another war, years after 

the one that was supposed to end them all. 
Did she think about the trenches, wonder 
what so many sons had died for? Hers 
hadn’t even been old enough, he told 

a lie to be able to go. The bronzes sit heavy, 
hold what can’t be unknown. In the center 
of the last room, three figures crouch 
together, metal bodies the color of mud. 

Thick arms, larger than life, wrap around 
an infant and toddler in a protective
embrace. My daughter is as quiet as me.
Old enough to imagine herself the mother

instead of the child. I wish my own arms
could be her fortress. War following war – 
ever since the first boy, in the first woman’s 
arms, the first pain of motherhood.