SHADOW

Only dying hate’s hate
only hate’s own American death throes —

If love was watching
and surely in the breast of the passing

wing it might have —  
It saw the woman man mother father child of a country

keening     kneeling for … surely love … surely … it will
blind death    —      tomorrow.

                                                                 ~
“Touch me.”

“You want a savior,” you say.

Your mouth opens slowly.        
Do you want me to pray?

I try to pray though the inside
of my mouth fills with bees.

“What hands do you have to heal the cruelty that is in your time?”

I open my small hands.

“Hold me,” you offer.     Under a black sky.
And one by one, the stars      all the stars      go  out.

There will be no more
Stars, I hear. Ever.

                                                                    ~ 

I am gathering stones.
Their voices are the screech of dying birds.

Does a branch cry when it falls backward? 
I am still     gathering stones.

The wars have not ended. And more have begun.
And there is your shadow before I meet your eyes.

I meet you at the shoreline gaping at the horizon,
knowing soon there are no more stars.

White veils grow from my shoulders. Wrap me.
I become all the not-dying wings. A not torn-winged girl.

And now I too am a stone. No feet, no hands.
A stone with a mouth.

You let me hold you all night. A child, a lover, a man, a woman,
an only friend. You let me touch you. And you cast a shadow.

I am listening to a stone. A very very large stone.
I hear my own voice — coming from you.

—A starling falls suddenly
— Dying in flight —

How much does its shadow
weigh?

 ~

 

Notes

I must begin by admitting that I never can or wish to explain a poem. But the poem may leave traces of itself—in my own mind and hopefully, in the mind of a reader. Traces, like the long shadow when dusk bleeds into night. I feel, painfully, that we are in such a time. Our time is a dusk bleeding into night. The dusk was magical. We spoke of love. We prayed at its edges. We walked the shorelines, gathering stones, as though they could remind us of what we once had, once tried to be. The night we face is frightening and we want to be saved from it.

Once, I found a large stone that seemed to me to have an open mouth, and I imagined it, knew it,  as one I called “the speaker stone.” I kept it. For a long time I wrote, and re-wrote—a poem, surreal and strange, for my outreach with and to that stone. I imagined it as a child. I imagined myself as a child, gathering it. Becoming it.

After many pages and versions, I cut the poem into shreds, and was left with its, and perhaps my own, shadow. The poem you read here is what has come of that earlier writing.  If I have not said what I wished to say here, in the words I offer, then I have failed. I must begin at the ending which is the beginning and the ending. My country, that is the country I was born in is, like an animal in its final death cries, dying. As is my, our—world. I try to touch it, as I tried to touch and be touched by the stone. I no longer know what will save us. I imagined that it might whisper to me and tell me how or if we may be saved from the cruelty that is our time. I am left with the shorelines…and the dusk bleeding into our night. Our night. The poem need not be, must not be explained. If it is found, lift it, hold it…allow its shadow.

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