Friday 27 April 2012

Subtitles of a Nightingale

Sweet lowly divinity, hold out your fragile hand.
Intervention of breathing leaves me weightless.

How bright morning illuminates your twisting halo. Into these arms allow yourself to fall, slowly, drifting on winds blown from the Sahara. Sand dunes have swept across continents, I have tasted their grains ina parched mouth.  Walk barefooted overfields of forget-me-knot. Into my arms I have folded love, wrapped into tissue paperand closed with sealing wax. My thumbprint, my heartbeat.

A body crosses over an imaginary line. Soon the sun willrise from deep heavenly slumber. A cosmos, shrouded in darkness becomes illuminated in heated glow of magnetic flares. Gilt angels slip beneath waves so I can depart. Destination unknown. Cry me a river of salt water and magnesium, potassium. Teach me the periodic table until I am fattened on elements. Learn me my own atomic weight.  I should have been happy and bleeding, serving servilities servants.  Butterfly wings caught in fishing nets cast upon dry river beds. Cracked, dusty earth coats feet, settles with an asbestos menace in lungs. Glass slides are coated with saliva and secretions of cellular biology. There is history in histology. We have become (or I) a study of cryogenics, no heat exists in love soured by interlinked genetic spoils.

Amber waves lick the shore, liquid glass. If we stop moving quick sand cannot lay claim to a physicality of memory. Every quiet step leads a dance to a rhythmic heartbeat. No deathly cold glaciers drive nightingales west. Open palms release their spring of remembering. I have not forgotten, but practice the patience of forgiveness. Of the self, or the soul. Galileo counted out sin, to mark mathematically dimension of my cage. On parchment, in numbers he drew my naked body into the stars.

An age may pass, my language seeps through fear until I grasp the sibilance of truth. There exists in vocality the essence of freedom.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2012

2 comments:

theunicornman said...

this poem is plain gorgeous, pain paid for. i absolutely love the cadence the eloquence & poetick narrative NO images you fingerpaint on my face, this is a powerful incantation. i am so lost in rereading it for joy that YOU composed it. no pit no mire no low center of ggravity keeping you down/grounded underneath the words against your will no not that, a rehearsal of sleeping undeath & stillness moving. Sa this work dances i am so happy to read it. in complete darkness my netbook illumins your doings & findings. Vox Anon

Blackbird said...

perfection

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