All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries
while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother.
This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb
of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our
grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed in the womb
of her grandmother.
~ Layne Redmond, When the Drummers were Women

There is something metaphoric about stacked
Russian dolls, how the little egg-shaped girl

sits inside the mother, the mother inside
the babushka, perfect fits, but separable,

each doll herself. It’s like that, I think,
me cellular but unformed in Mother’s body

while she was a fetus in her mother’s womb,
a great start for my life, the beginning

of the many ways I was nurtured by Mother
and Grandmother, the ways their strength

and openness to the world gave me the pluck
to be myself while still held in the wings of their faith,

my pulse beating to the rhythms they taught,
the songs they sang still echoing.

~ Wilda Morris

Previously published in Nostos, IV (2020), p. 119.