English is nominally my native language, but really, my source of expression and strength is song.  This has been a terrible week in my country and among my loved ones, so of course I have turned my heart and hearing to what we do best:  Loving those we see with our hearts, and telling them so in magic-laden words.

This is for those who hear me, through this page, and the songs we make together:

16 June 2016

16

I Ran; You Wailed Forth Sailing Tunes

I ran to wail, like all the flocks of birds—It’s mating season here—

though I am one so wary of the slightest touch, and no one near

resembles in aye shadow’s aspect someone I could hold still for—

so still I ran. And when he heard and fell, he knew I’d learned far more

than any spirit, paired in flesh or subtlty, recording now

the silences that lean toward the meeting-places sworn to vow

their children to the current’s blood before it runs in veins—You’ll swear

your child was borne inside you, till it left; you’re on a line stripped bare

of any mortal sustenance, though breathing fast as ever, wrought

toward the shining place where greeting spirits reel around the thought

that maybe you knew well how far you’d come before you left this place.

You’ll have to work much harder; you’re illuminated life whose grace

just will not give off leaking every-which-way. You’re a soul whose eyes

transported my imagination far across the seas of skies

that leant to offer strange unburdens, songs that lightened all we breathed—

Soon we lay in lovely ocean beds where dreadful hours, that seethed

with pain, suspense, and superstition, horrid apparitions, whole

black nights’-long broken stairs that lead to dungeons—You can’t claim your soul

was ever blameless, but you dream all night of times before time sang

its artlessness throughout your veins, and you told time—Go on, you, hang.

I ran to wail when I was just a girl whose bedroom let the wind

blow through so strongly, all night long I watched ice-patterns grow. I pinned

their likeness to the page, and maybe sometimes flesh; I’ll never tell.

Tunes poured forth like rain from sails that held it where they can’t help swell.