I know it will come back - I hope it will come back.
but in that moment I still can’t breathe. and my heart is pounding because what if, my breath doesn’t return; what if, you forget to call back - again - and what if, this time, we are lost forever.
This season is one of rot and poison where buzzards circle and insects swarm; Digging and burrowing through the layers of waxy leaves, releasing rancid plumes that drive out any other living thing. Scores of holes - tunnels rimmed with blackened sludge and delving inwards where the damage has become far too deep.
This season is one where we stand in plumes of biting flies, surrounded by mounds of molted leaves strewn across fields which used to be alive.
Among those mounds of cold barbed wire you seem much more at home. Your heart belongs to thorns and briars among those mounds of cold barbed wire. And though you say you need to find her, since we left her alone among those mounds of cold barbed wire, you seem much more at home.
“Don’t jump,” he said, “From this height you will fly.” But caring words are useless to the dead. “(don’t) Jump” he said. I guess those words had jumbled in my head. who knows what he had really meant, I Don’t. “Jump,” he said, “From this height you will fly.”
Late at night in the cover of darkness, the young woman cries in her sleep. She cries for the baby bird with the broken wings who she buried early that morning. She cries for her homeland, a place where the sun never sets and the young never die. She cries for her pots of flowers that wilt in the wintery winds. She cries for her brother, her lover, every man she knows, because they are not permitted to cry for themselves. She cries for her father, who she never met, and her mother, who has become a stranger to her in this country. She cries for her sister, sent off to a loveless marriage far away. Late at night, the young woman cries for everyone and everything she knows. And she hopes, that someone, somewhere, cries for her too.
Who told the cormorant to dive so deep inside me? No one. She chose to ride the midnight wind and swoop through my body while I slept, settling in as the sun began to rise.
And when the golden glow makes the shadows dance over to me, and pry my eyes open in a sudden start, I feel her tuck her wings, hunching down before taking flight.
If only I could warn her first, that the walls of my chest surround her still, And as she tries to lift up into the open air, she’ll take my beating heart with her.
She drags it high above my ribs, before plunging deep towards my guts. She squirms, disturbing its constant rhythm, twisting it around inside of me until my feet have hit the ground.
Then the all of a sudden her grip is broken, and my heart resumes its job, sending her spiraling out the window and into the sky, a whooping cormorant made in waiting.
