Monday 13 May 2013

The Navigator & Atlas

You should not try to lug along what you are trying to leave behind.
L Francis Herreshoff

My life is my own, I fought for it to be so.


If you know my name then you know little of me or where I have travelled from. Across the oceans I have voyaged until my seasickness has cleansed my liver and my sense of self. There are no dreams when sleeping under the stars for you do not sleep at all. The elegant brightness of their wayward nature drives you to insomnia. My Mother let me sleep in her arms when I returned home, which was to infrequent. She lives by the sea now in the hope of seeing one of us, those missing, drifting across the breaking waves to the shore.

I know I am not the one she is waiting for but she welcomes me still with open arms for she bore me from her love, if not her own body. Deeply I have felt the nature of our love and spoon fed it to myself when alone upon my raft with the broken sail. I know where she stands sentinel. Watching and waiting. She will remain there static until time runs away with itself and she can stop counting the days they have been parted. Her breath is held fast in her lungs, no longer to exhale.

We are left with one breath when heart broken. It sits within us waiting for our lover to return so we may breathe life into them again. Never to turn blue but translucent as life falls away from our bodies. It does not take bricks and bars to make a prison. Your heart can still beat, out of time and rhythm but you remain of this world.

How are you. How are any of us. No one can say for certain until they have lost and loved and lost all over again. Have you felt this. Why do I ask. You feel it every day. To lock away your heart is to lose everything before it has begun.

Look at me, I am turning in the light and these tears are not what they once were.

Atlas, dear Atlas, put down your burden and rest your weary head in my arms. Sleep for two thousand years and meet the new Gods that speak in tongues and rules of Christianity. This is not my faith and I shall teach you how to read another language other than Latin. We have no need for medical references any longer.

Measures of light and love are not assigned to individuals on merit or some ritualistic prefix of linage. Everyone is equal for everyone is equal to me. The past is the past and we shall leave it there, untouched, to rest peacefully for some time. Who needs to dig wounds when they are healing. The cosmos is vast enough for us to escape from view and love eternally unseen. I am singing but need no one to hear my words. Lay down my darling and shall wrap you in lace and salt water. Deeply I am unmoved from my course. We, us, the women I love, have charted a course. My navigator, my captain and I. We set sail today, not tomorrow. For every day is this one and this day, shall always be ours.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

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