dustpanalley
Elderberry twig- for Riana
The wild elderberry twigs that traveled thousands of miles to rest here in our verdant soil are busting out with messages from my sand sister. Like hummingbirds grafting silence on silence, there is a residue in the air that speaks even without words and the swelling buds on the twigs have told me all of this. As though in my own voice. The coarse grind of life has left it's texture on my skin so that I am thick like summer air and toothsome like peasant bread fresh risen from a hot brick grave.
Ripe seeds fall like earthy children, to the ground, to the surface of wet fall soil in a chaos of fertility. Some will rot like human hope, yet many will germinate impossibly bright to emerge in spring with the rising heat and the brighter longer light at the same moment that the hens' eggs begin to fill straw nests for the hungry.
There is a world of sick out there. In here. Everywhere. I would like to heal it all. I would like to reach my hand out to your fevered skin; to cool it with my feverfew petals and my cold breath. Let me lay wilted comfrey leaves across your brow in hopes that it might still your racing heart; fill your panic with calm, compress your inflamed spirit so that it might lie still long enough to see its own shape in the context of the moon.
You have seen yourself naked a thousand times and enjoyed yourself in skin and light and air, yet you are still finding the limits of your spirit with blind fingers, sightless eyes, in a darkness so complete that even the night shivers in its skin with apprehension. Here you find the fences of your capability expand and shrink according to your experiments and these outlines are gorgeous, they show a sister robed in the humility of limitation; a junction at which new definitions might be drawn with the charcoal of cold fire.
It isn't for you to fit, but to define.
I walk graves everyday. I feel the dead in the soil, far beneath the asphalt. I speak with what has breathed in early dawn and died by nightfall. Ephemeral beings given only the briefest voice with which to express a thousand years of experience. Yours is a voice that resonates past twilight, into the moon, past the darkest hour.
When that light of yours flickers against impossible blows, let me light the rest of the way. I owe you a path into the morning. Into the protection of warm soil. Damp undergrowth and layers of decomposed leaves. Be ready.
Elderberry twig- for Riana
The wild elderberry twigs that traveled thousands of miles to rest here in our verdant soil are busting out with messages from my sand sister. Like hummingbirds grafting silence on silence, there is a residue in the air that speaks even without words and the swelling buds on the twigs have told me all of this. As though in my own voice. The coarse grind of life has left it's texture on my skin so that I am thick like summer air and toothsome like peasant bread fresh risen from a hot brick grave.
Ripe seeds fall like earthy children, to the ground, to the surface of wet fall soil in a chaos of fertility. Some will rot like human hope, yet many will germinate impossibly bright to emerge in spring with the rising heat and the brighter longer light at the same moment that the hens' eggs begin to fill straw nests for the hungry.
There is a world of sick out there. In here. Everywhere. I would like to heal it all. I would like to reach my hand out to your fevered skin; to cool it with my feverfew petals and my cold breath. Let me lay wilted comfrey leaves across your brow in hopes that it might still your racing heart; fill your panic with calm, compress your inflamed spirit so that it might lie still long enough to see its own shape in the context of the moon.
You have seen yourself naked a thousand times and enjoyed yourself in skin and light and air, yet you are still finding the limits of your spirit with blind fingers, sightless eyes, in a darkness so complete that even the night shivers in its skin with apprehension. Here you find the fences of your capability expand and shrink according to your experiments and these outlines are gorgeous, they show a sister robed in the humility of limitation; a junction at which new definitions might be drawn with the charcoal of cold fire.
It isn't for you to fit, but to define.
I walk graves everyday. I feel the dead in the soil, far beneath the asphalt. I speak with what has breathed in early dawn and died by nightfall. Ephemeral beings given only the briefest voice with which to express a thousand years of experience. Yours is a voice that resonates past twilight, into the moon, past the darkest hour.
When that light of yours flickers against impossible blows, let me light the rest of the way. I owe you a path into the morning. Into the protection of warm soil. Damp undergrowth and layers of decomposed leaves. Be ready.