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Illusion is our imagined separation from God
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Bend down and savour
the shallow water,
stroking out praise like
the wind strokes the skin on a gentle day.
I was in the pit,
closed across the journey,
forming lines, lining up eagle eggs, pine cones
and leashes. Breaking though
irregular dreams that break the edges
and expand in an un-uniformed spill.
My love was lost when I footed the bridge.
My love fell over the rail like a stone.
Its sinking was mandatory as only heavy things can
make a storm or hiding places for surface-crawlers.
My love was my body – left side wracked with aching joints,
stealing the sunlight air, sleep and my swift directed walk.
Goodbye old love that trembled in
survival’s ruthless prison pit, fed on dread and fireants –
skin stretched like a belly that bore countless stillborn babies.
Without choice in the pit, calling a block-square-of-sky heaven
and the starlings that would occasionally stop
to land and peer below.
All that love is gone, old, though because
once worthy and living, it is honored for its gifts.
The ground rises beneath me, the pit shortens
into a short-climb out. My limbs awaken and harness
the edges where direct light pours in.
The first thing to go will be my heritage,
from this life and lifetimes before –
bonds of steely anger, irredeemable deficiencies,
those bonds like throat chains that became like laws
that I pulled at, tried to cut or at least fray, now
I blow them away like down-fluff feathers.
How soft they have become,
their hardness swelled like shells breached
to reveal tender interiors.
I swallowed, and they are gone.
Love, I am learning a freer way of your expression,
entering a top layer, climbing.
I am almost out, on a flat plane, almost
I can see the treeline, the fullness
of a full skyline of sunrise on one side and sunset on the other,
surrounding plane in a circular scope.
I see dimensions pierced and I know
it has always been this way,
no pit, not ever, only this love,
now shed of illusion, away from its hell.
I can speak again, sing again, bathe upstream.
© 2018 by Allison Grayhurst
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “Academy of the Heart of Mind”, February 2018
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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:
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