Where Are My Daughters?

Where are my daughters -
the unborn, the aborted ones?
Where are my daughters
now I am old and need
the touch of gentle ways?

Where are my daughters -
the spirit children who didn’t stay,
who never clothed themselves
completely with my flesh
but cast it off before the breath of day
caught in their veins?
Their primal gills filtered my amniotic broth,
they lapped at life from my blood's eager stream.

Where are the daughters I never taught
the female lores and rites -
never mothered, never sistered,
but felt their presence, briefly,
like a folded bud, its bright corolla
secreted away? Where are my daughters
I never held, or named?