Days come, go, stay, slow.
Where are the lines so many struggled to stray? The lines that haunt, that speak to something, anything.
As kids, we would look above, to the weighing, suspended black canvas and whisper as summer-dew crickets: “There’s the North Star! There’s the light!”
We’re found.
Found and safe and sure of a rising sun and midnight cookie dipped in white—our guardians, keeper of secrets.
Pinky swear, cross our heart and hope to die.
Repetition chains a figure so torn and ready. Everything is sure and steady, no questions, no tarnished gaze.
But the rules did not know you or me.
And jumping like the wind that presses our scribbled skin, we skip the cold ground, our feet lift and glide and we are off, unaware of the interrupted game of hopscotch, jump rope and double-dutch.
Across that stage, name called, robe falls, and we’re left, bare and cold and unsure.
The paparazzi snap, snap, snap photos restore in still!
Our eyes, burnt in a ring of light, the North Star faded from sight.
Our map gone in a cloud of ash,
Fog stretches across the universe, wrapping our skin in silk streams.
If only we could lie in a field, so green, so gold;
A sun, a moon, a star that points to home.
The wind that whisks in circles, cold.
Flowers rustle in a struggle to hold together this world, together a time that flies in a light that shatters, fractures in shards of painted glass.
Ceased to be remembered,
Time calls, it knocks, it beats.
Alive. Alive. Alive. A lie.
To walk, to run, to sprint. We walk, we run, we sprint, and then we are finished.
Finished when the golden light meets the white wash.
Finished when the clouds morph into one, and the North Star shines directly above as lightning strikes the tallest tree, the tallest light that bathes in a cooling, crashing sea of people, lives, cries and keys.
Cold, and broken,
And hallelujah.
It’s over. It’s just begun.
No comments:
Post a Comment