Grave (at the River Bend)

daughter of thunder · Grave (at the River Bend)

I do not know

Have you tried the truth yet?

I know, it is disgusting--

All of those wet bodies

Not sardines, but all the more so

Entombed. 

Sardines but human

Raped young bulls but human 

Slaughterhouse but human home.

I 

Do not 

Know

What any grandchild is to make of all these ashes,

But to deny the ashes exist?

While he’s coughing up blood 

Lungs filled of fluid and another man’s folly?

The banks like the back are broken,

Feeble 

Arms grasping at the edges of their own extinction.

My God, how tired the dollar bill must be!

Weighed down by centuries of dead skin and bones;

I do not pity its inevitable demise.

Neither is an apology lethal

Is not humiliating 

Is not exacting, even but 

Rather a calling to arms, to alliance.

The grandsons would like to put the urn down now

But safely

But gently 

But human.

Grief of such impenetrable power 

Cannot run its river course

Without allowance from the trees to 

Bend.

Postscript// my own ancestors were complicit in the gravest crimes in human history; that doesn’t make me a victim of slavery and that doesn’t make me my ancestors.

Isaiah 58:6

At Wrest

daughter of thunder · At Wrest

Certainty is the weight on your chest

Even at wrest, cannot catch your breath

The absolute bottom of the barrel 

Bad Guy to end all bad guys

But why does he have your same left thigh birthmark?

Or why does her sharp wit

Cut glass in the same backward blade as yours?

The mirror knows what the reflection refuses to see.

The Pharisee, a champion against time and mercy

The father feeding his family from the table of demons,

The most well-fed woman in the world 

Who convinced her husband of their hunger:

Is not God, Himself, their Villain? 

Imagine that is the truth you have chosen to believe.

James 1:23-25

Culture Culture

daughter of thunder · Culture Culture

All it takes is a sample of society

slicked smooth sliver of it really

to understand

science is not salvation.

The petri dish swarming in spilt blood

Cannot cure itself of the

lust for more blood.

Even as the skin or the very spine of

the river ran dry,

Still the physicist tries to

heal immorality.

Hands

Clasped

Desperately

at the beaker in prayer,

Cut glass poking through the flesh

of their 

very last hope.

about: from an anthropological standpoint, people will cling to their culture (whether born from semen or science) even if it's killing them.