To bless the body, grief arranges for it a bed by Nome, Emeka Patrick
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herald & hollow/ i hear the rattle of pain in my bones/ nightly/ i stay up to listen for my mother’s ghost in the garden/ i have nothing to offer/ nothing except these little pearls of eyes/ red & wet as the Egyptian lake/ i have no prayer to say/ except those i say when the world slumbers away into sleep/ the oral artist says grief isn’t a name/ it’s a pebble washed to the threshold of your body by failure/ i keep burning my mouth with a song just to understand how the birds dream when the storm visits/ twice i contemplated suicide/ but who doesn’t dream of heaven with all the hell we bed through on earth/ i tear down my curtains so light can disguise as God swallowing shadows in my room/ everything i own is lonely or aging or dying/ i want the birds in my mouth to understand how God felt saying let it be/ i want the flowers in my hand to understand how bliss is the last praying bead in the monk’s fingers/ i keep burning my sleep to keep my bed warm/ i keep watching from the window to be sure the stars are not my mother’s ghostly eyes winking from the edge of the world/ what about the psalms of spiders in my spine? what about the bat nestled behind my eyes?/ five years ago/ my grandmother died in her sleep with all those wrinkled promises & flurry folk prayers/ i am running far away from the sun only to end up in a temple my body once erected/ i kneel outside myself to peep into what lies inside the chapel of my body/ tonight i want the sky i want the stars i want the moon/ it’s the only way i know the boy is alive/ breathing undying/ with yellow larks beaking tunes in his bones/ to fill him in all the places the hands of grief once bore a dark hole/ a night wide enough to swallow a lost lamb/ |
Fiona’s works can be found on her website and her instagram page.
