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Principles of duty
overtaking sleep like a wave.
Heavy love rooted in isolation,
reflecting the depths of true giving.
A condition turns to disease, restrictions
bare down. What is ordinary becomes like
a cage. Children in the drifting storm, drifting
on condensed-traffic streets, how I love you.
How I would do everything I cannot do to ease
the grip of your elephant shackles. Mine was the angel’s
autonomy, where nothing was miscellaneous and my bed
was a rich blackness that absorbed all time. Mine was loud
without noise or distraction, just the buoyant sparkle flow
of paired-off stars and the countless debris of ongoing creation.
Mine is yours now, inside less-than-working-organs, kidneys
like puzzle pieces, seamed together by an amateur.
Where are you now, God-who-remembers, reminds me
of what I once was? My God and Jesus of the lilies,
why the children? Why this fluke,
this bizarre nightmare crawling, closer,
closer than when I had no body, no loves to look after?
And oh I am tired, worn as an old shoe that must keep
the broken glass at bay. Where are you my God, my Jesus?
I know you are here. I know something, but not enough
to deflate my bloating anxiety. It is grief all over again and I
hide myself in older hands, friendless, unsupported, remembering
the wholeness in every flaw, in the universe’s veined light
I once travelled on. Remembering that what is flawed sparkles
with a unique variation of beauty, rainbow fractions, infractions
that are blessings that seep and saturate sinews
and bones, galaxies
perpetual, renewable
where everything sings useful –
seemingly incongruent, yet in truth, masterfully
precise.
….
Copyright © 2014 by Allison Grayhurst (poem and images)
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Copyright © by Allison Grayhurst 2014
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry” Volume 4, Number 1, June Issue 2014
http://themuse.webs.com/June%202014/muse%20june%2014.pdf
http://themuse.webs.com/latestissues.htm
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You can listen to the poem below:
In response to the poem – Walkways:
“This is brilliant! Brilliant. Reminds me of when I first read Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. And I wanted to stand up on the city bus and exclaim aloud: “Listen to this!” A comprehensive capturing of human earthly experience in all its dimensions without missing a beat – beyond the conscious mind – dancing with the levels of our knowing and sensing – that we feel but do not always recognize, and rarely, oh so rarely articulate. Clearly, Grayhurst’s poetic journey has taken her to the mountain top,” Taylor Jane Green, registered holistic talk therapist and author..
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Reblogged this on MrMilitantNegro™.
That was powerful. <3