Wordy Monday with Wild Woman: The Wolf Mother

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"The loss of the wolf is like the loss of the mother. Somewhere she roams in memory, in darkness. Our bond with her is inexplicable, before the beginning of time. She is fierce love; she is sorrow. She is a howling in the wilderness we can never see, calling us home. She is what we fear – and what we long to return to – the heat of the cave and animal closeness, before all civilization and reason.…The wolf is the dark heart of winter. She is the hot breath of life, red eyes searching for her child at twilight in the snow.”

-from The Memory Palace, by Mira Bartók

The Memory Palace  is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. It is the story of the author and her sister growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother, and the lives they managed to forge after, of necessity, they disappeared and changed their names as adults.

The passage above really spoke to me, needless to say. Where does it take you? To a wolf den in a Siberian winter? To wolf families vanishing across the North American landscape, falling to loss of habitat, to starvation, to the hunter's gun? Maybe it takes you to a fireside, and a mother fierce with love? Or to the mothers we have lost, whose pull is still strongly felt in our hearts.

Answer the wolf’s call with your poems about wildness and wolves, domesticity and mothers, daughters and sons, or your own fierce love for your child. Allow the passage quoted to take you where it pleases. Bring us back whatever you find.