Daughter Heart / Mother Spirit

Daughter Heart / Mother Spirit is a conversation across realms, a sacred dialogue between the living and the dead. It is a reckoning and a remembering. A poetic excavation of grief, longing, lineage, and love. In this exchange between me as a daughter and my mother’s spirit, may you witness the quiet power of ancestral connection as a path to healing. By speaking aloud what was once left unsaid, we begin to mend wounds carried through generations. This is not just a tribute to what was lost, but a reclaiming of what still lives: the questions, the echoes, the ache, and the fierce, enduring choice to keep loving anyway. To talk with our ancestors is to unearth the roots of our pain and nurture the soil for something new to bloom.

Daughter Heart:

I walk the same paths, you know…
Barefoot on the wild edges of the yard, where the grass grows feral and forgiving.
I wonder, Mama, did you feel the same freedom?
Did the trees call you upward, like they call me?
Did your small hands wrap around bark with dreams of escape tucked behind your ribs?

I climb and I listen for your echo.
Were your dreams ever interrupted by the sounds of nature?
The cicadas, the owls, the wind whispering all the truths too soft to say out loud?
I keep asking questions like they'll summon you back.
Like maybe if I long loud enough, you'll answer.

Mother Spirit:

I did run.
Oh baby, I ran hard and fast and often.
Not because I hated where I was, but because I didn’t yet know how to be still.
The holiness in me felt like a burden then, not a birthright.
And yes, you get that from me.
You carry my restlessness, but you wear it wiser.

I climbed trees too, and I dreamed.
Of oceans I’d never seen.
Of silence.
Of someone loving me long enough to hear me when I whispered I was tired.

Daughter Heart:

So you were trying to escape it, your holiness?
Maybe that’s why I’ve spent my life trying to return to mine.
I promise you, I am learning from your mistakes.
And from your mother’s.
And from mine, the ones I haven’t even made yet.
The ones I’m terrified I’ll pass down to a child I haven’t met.

Because, Mama,
I ache to be a mother.
In the same breath I ache for you.
It’s the same ache.
A deep, hollow longing shaped like inheritance.
I want to hold a child with your eyes.
I want to become someone worthy of being missed.

Mother Spirit:

You already are.
You’ve always been.
Even when you don’t see it.
Especially then.

You talk about rewinds and do-overs,
as if time owes us mercy.
But I believe mercy is already ours.
If we meet again,
you’ll teach me to slow down long enough to see the stars and the fireflies at the same time.
And I’ll tell you about love,

not the kind I had, but the kind I wanted.

And I’ll watch you cradle life.
You’ll be the kind of mother who tells stories in whispers and in fire.
The kind who listens when silence speaks louder than words.
You’ll teach your child the art of longing and belonging.
Just like you learned it from losing me.

Daughter Heart:

Sometimes I imagine us,
me making coffee,
you in the kitchen with your lasagna from a box,
both of us pretending like nothing was ever broken.
That we never hurt each other by dying too soon or being born too late.
I like that world.
In that world, we don’t just belong to each other.
We choose each other.

Mother Spirit:

That’s the truest part.
Choice.
Even here, beyond flesh and breath, I choose you.
I always did.
Even when I didn’t know how to stay.
Even when I left.

Daughter Heart:

I look in the same mirrors.
And sometimes I find you there,
just behind my eyes.
Other times, I find myself.

I used to be jealous.
That you had someone with your eyes.
That you got to hold her.
But then I remember,
so did I.

And I still do.

Mother Spirit:

You carry me.
But more than that, you carry forward.

Written by Korie Griggs

Author of Suffer Well - Poems for the Grieving