12.02.18

When I started out,

I don’t think I had the words,

nor the strength to bear them,

the heart to speak them,

the presence of mind to create them.

I was a hollow traveller,

lost vagrant

haunting the wayward palaces

of long forgotten principalities and powers.

 

I never understood.

I still may not.

I begged the dawn to shine it’s light

upon my ignorant and ignoble countenance.

To enrich me,

to enlighten me,

to raise me up

like Lazarus from the pit of death.

The words still did not come.

I was intractable.

I was lost.

I was unable to discern the sky from the ground,

the sea from the mountains,

the birds from the reptiles,

from the insects,

from the fish.

 

I abhorred creation.

If my mouth could not utter

one mystical incantation,

nor my hands perform

one acceptable sacrifice,

nor my loins

produce offspring unto the Earth,

then my barren mind

was a prison,

more intolerable than all of Pharaoh’s Egypt.

 

I did not sink into the ground.

I was not water,

to be absorbed by the dry sand.

I did not evaporate

into the air and become clouds;

instead I stood,

under the Sun,

and was burned.

 

My skin flaked off.

Something new beneath.

Nothing I had recognized,

but here were songs in my head again.

I cut a new mouth in my head

and began to speak the truth.

My throat overflowed with living water,

my eyes shone silver,

my body light

and unfettered by the leashes of past masters.

 

Then I beheld the desert,

not as a prison,

but a new canvas.

An empty book,

to be filled.

I took up a stick

and began to write

the history of the world.

Not my words,

but everyone’s.

Out into the dry emptiness

until the wind takes me.

 

-HG