Tide one on idleness
A white page and the mind rushing in with words, thought, constructing a poem of the rational.
It makes me sick reading it back – so stale and monotonous like two lovers that have forgotten how to love, that have nothing between them but the inability to get out.
When I write, I pour. What comes out it’s not really mine, not mine only. I permeate, I exhume words not of mind, but of felt sense, of inner experience.
I feel clogged and stuck like an old pipe. No poems come out but blank pages and the mind’s games. In me, a great concoction building – poems and feelings and roars and longings – brewing and boiling, unable to get out also.
I write to live. To let out what must, must, must be out.
The blank page drains me; its widening spaciousness, uncertainty and loud invitation, its demands for words and filling, it frightens me. I’m dry and empty.
Salt water dissolves this stagnancy.
Sea water moves through me.
My body, a great body of water.
***
Tide two: I come from generations of priests
Within the strings of DNA matrix, I hold centuries of god worship. I’m turned on by the mystical, god rising in goosebumps, his name uttered daily by my great grandfathers.
But my body is that of my grandmothers, seeding god in their harvests, breasts hanging heavy with longing, roughened palms digging soil, god in the mundane, in the harvest and conjured in the fires they tended to each morning.
The calling is so great, visceral, the bones growing white bone-arms to reach, the blood flowing like a dark sea heaving with force. Any attempts to silence the voice within calling you to it will drive you insane. The mind unable to comprehend the enormity of this longing within.
I lose my mind every time I depart from it too, from the same song that my great grandfathers heard, sailing through their lives, waters enchanted by the voice of the mystical. I hold too the ancestral longing, cell walls dissolving through in prayer.
My body recalibrates the flow, an instrument, for unlike them I am Womb-carrier, Mother. Not light and shiny like a great sun but dark and un-tamable like the sea.
Blessed in their repetitive liturgies, I carry their light in my fingertips
and carve a new path.
My grandfather’s death bore no grief.
They rejoiced and cried in relief
his grave untended.
I only heard stories of his godlessness,
the acute lack of love and loving.
I cannot help but seek for the stories untold,
the unspoken
questioning the forbidden.
I cannot help but visit dark corners of the mind
where truth often likes to hide.
Unwinding cursed threads into blessings
loving the most unlovable
and grieving whom no one dared to grieve before.
***
I’m sorry.
I forgive you.
Thank you.
I love you.
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