Monday 13 May 2013

letters of their law

Convicted to the letters of the law we are drawn across paths colliding. Turning about ourselves searching for the maps that we mislaid in the dark. There is no spark to ignite the dark night that rolls over us. Blankets us in a melee to warm the cold sensation of loss. I have more children than you can count, or see, or hear. Some sounds are never heard. We do not talk of him often. I cannot say that we buried him, only that he is lost somewhere on the water. I have drunk down the coarseness of loss and swallowed the fallacy of the stories told to send you to sweet slumber.

You can say as many times as you like that you don’t want to hear, but I am telling you the way that is has been. Years and years the skies have been dyed with the strains of verses lifted from old books whose spines have been broken. This is the circus we have been living in. Crack the whip and confirm in all your delightful youthfulness. Have you heard the man singing of the rambling roses, deep and low his voice comes around the corner. Your fear knows itself backward. There are no surprises, who can say which is worse.
Give me pieces of your precious love and I shall hold them tightly as I walk the shale shore. Skimming stones only occupies an idle mind for so long. Sailors have sung songs on such subjects for years. I don’t know why. We are causal now, under the gaze of bettered selves.

As children we walked to the pond at the crossroads, wadded through reeds to shallow pools of frog spawn. In my blue dress with crows circling overhead we scooped handfuls into jam jars to carry home. Curiosity is a cruel lesson to learn.  They hatched, life does, doesn’t it, and they hopped away looking for maternal comfort. I found them dried and dead in the grass four feet from where they started. I knew the instinct of escape but not return. My grandmother gave me a bowl of water to paint with in the sun, great washes of imagination across the concrete. Disappointment is harder to swallow when your creative endeavours are lost to explanations of evaporation.

Up, up and away. Take me with you.

Where did you go little one, you did not vaporise from my fingertips. Where you lost to the flood as the Israelites made their way from me. Only the rupture of my insides can know the course we run when leaving ourselves and our maternal vessels for the first time.  Impatience may be a hereditary trait. Or panic seized your heart. I never whispered the secrets of linage, for I cannot profess knowing the source of DNA. Lullabies have never been my forte and I have never managed to hold a tune beyond the first chorus. But you never let me try. Clever you. How brave to make your own escape, far cleverer than I.

Look to the sky and you will the markings of history captured for the world to see. No one looks the way we do, because we have seen it all before. Lived each moment before we set it there in an act of retrospection. Across the sky and across my body. It was the only way to read my history. You have no name. Eighteen years later what name do you desire, have you learnt to read and write on the other side of this story. Do not let the demons turn you with the sound of their singing. Cornflowers erupt form the ground where they laid the ashes as the gathering stared at my spindle limbs. No one speaks when the moment dictates and all conversations are held behind closed doors. There are many small foetal lies left scattered about the place. I wouldn’t recommend digging in the vegetable patch too deeply. There are reasons that people lay roots in one place and they are laid about five feet below the earth. We all know this to be true. Those who share biological characteristics.  We have told one another our history time and again.

 Follow the letters of the law and we are all guilty. Of one thing or another. My fingerprints are all over the evidence. I am not afraid to say this and no punishment will be handed down today. Not by these hands. Justice will wait until another time and place, it is not for here, not for this body. I am my own forgiveness. I am my own messenger and Mother. Love is a state of being, not a measure of worth given to you by passers-by. My witnesses are few, but they will look me in the eye and hold my heart when it becomes weary from time to time.

Draw your conclusion. The rest is mine.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

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