Monday, 13 May 2013
Hornets
Behind my eyes I am hiding, behind my eyes are the stories that you have heard whispered across the sea as the moon pulls away from the earth. Drawing back to reveal the lay of the land, saddened, drenched with the sorrowful drowning of promises written upon sand. There are not always reasons why we love the way we do. We just do. It cannot be helped and the hindrance around our hearts must be worn as a straitjacket when madness comes calling our name
It knows mine well, we have become bedfellow these many years, it has ravaged my body with the intimacy of a lover spurned. Spiteful. Only the rooks can know the grief, I have heard it in their voices as they scavenge for the dead. We lay ours out, to examine. It surprises me they have not bled on the carpet. I have craved it so, historically. To leave evidence of the grotesque nature of it all. My romantic gene misfires memorandums from mind to miracles. How am I still walking. I don’t know how the madness came to be so strong, I gave in too quickly. Or was it the long and bitter bombardment that caused the final caving in. My pride once convex is dented, rusting.
I have visions of wine and water, of thick black coffee sliding down my throat. This does not extract the sensation of my formative years. Cry. Why do you never cry. For sure it must be the vanity engrained in you. There is nothing ugly about a sobbing woman, unless it is over a man too soon known and lost. This is a different tale and I cannot consider immoral obligations of the flesh.
His glasses are still resting where he left them on a Saturday morning. By the Wednesday there was no need of them. Seeing is only good when you have a view and I heard they spike your eyes closed. Is this to prevent you from seeing the faces your children and grandchildren make over your cold dead body. They are not what you would expect. I would have spat but my mouth had done so dry that I could barely talk.
Grey carpet, grey walls, grey body. Light had left the room or my vision impaired, limited my sensations. It is for your own good. Fear provokes two reactions however my flight defence is defective. Run, right back to hornets’ nest, strip down to your shame and let them annihilate you. They trapped a hornet once, ensnared between the window and the yellow stained net curtain, my grandmother beat it to death with her shoe. It was the same shoe she used when I told lies. Who can tell the difference between and insect and a child. They break the same under force. It was the urgent sense of freedom that frightened her, the droning sound of escape and for her, exposure.
There, there, it will all be well in the end. As I stuff my fist in my mouth to push back the truth rising like bile. Role reversal. Children are taught to tell the truth, or the adult version of it.
The camber of the long road ahead shifts from side to side giving the sense of sailing. Distance is only relative. Four thousand mile is the same as four steps when your legs are tied together. I need rescuing. I am rescued already. Us two, you and I, heaved my mind from an infinite body of umbilical water. Remember, today is only a moment and will pass into tomorrow. To spark then, with a sense of newness that shall captivate my eyes with images laden in veracity. The cold stings me back to where I truly am. But it is too far from the arms of those I love and for now, I must content myself with the lukewarm recollection of their arms.
Copyright: Samantha Ledger 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
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
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
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
Running to the Sea
I have never felt such loneliness.
I heard her whisper this as she woke in the morning, as the sun shone through lace and rag strung from a window to mask the emptiness outside.
Have you never felt this way. Yes, always. Until the fear was silenced and I could hear the sound of birds singing as dusk.
Why do we feel guilt as the ropes that entwine us to each other tighten. My brother does not know the name of children, does not know their faces. I have studied his too close for comfort and am now struck by the irony of missing what was once had and is now lost. We are easily discarded when the rain begins to fall. The grass become greener. They ask you not to swim in a thunder storm but you do it anyway, or else you miss the beauty of the light beneath the waves. Waves created by your own movement, by the living mechanics of your body. We are free under water, suffocated of air, removed from confines and rules and rituals. Comb your hair one hundred times and always kiss goodnight the people that love you.
Tell me what love is, tell her. Tell us both and explain how we lost our way through the woods as the sun was burning at sundown.
There are only so many shadows deep enough to hide a child, even less to conceal a woman and I have grown now. Grown in size without dragging the infant behind me. I am not her mother, why should I care if she is left behind. No one liked her anyway, and the quaint beauty serves as a punishment after we have said our prayers of an evening. Seething with a rage I knew (you know it too) she burnt the house down without even lighting a match. You can deny things as much as you want but the stains of sulphur are on the tip of your tongue. Explain the mechanics of that is you can.
We are running and running far from here, we are running and running to the sea.
Come lay with me upon the sand, let it wash over your nakedness. I see you as you see me, fully clothed. I see into the promises that were broken and the kisses that were given to someone else. No woman is all miracle, and every heart can be broken. May we ride the ivory elephant back to the tower and never come down. But you so rightly say that we would miss the songbirds of a morning. I look into your eyes and see the salt flooding them. See the sea of grief washing over you. Who has died. No one and yet everyone, to you we are all living dead and even then you do not stop loving.
I saw you yesterday knelt amongst dead wood on the shore, clutching it to your chest and screaming into the howling wind. I haven’t the heart to ask you to do it where I can see and hear because part of me wants the secret to remain unspoken. Wrap your arms around me and I shall envelop you in my own. They can take the weight now, they can take the rocking of the boat in the storm. My mouth is dry as I taste the air, taste the turning of the wind and the coming of the rain. You stare casually at my ring finger and I at yours. One dressed, the other bare. How dare those we love leave us when we are still in love with them. How cruel. And what purpose does it possibly serve.
A servant said that to her mistress and I know the meaning was lost as the wind drew the sounds of the words from her lips. There are so many new faces, how can I ever remember their names. We turn over and over in the breaking of the waves. Everyone else wants to be saved, to be safe on the shore. You and I, she, you, me, us the collective feminine long to return to the water. Snared in our own day dream. Kelp and cuttle fish.
I sit here with you and realise in the warm afternoon sun I am living a cliche, caught in a day dream. For all this is unspoken between us two. For in all our words we have said everything and then nothing, for dialogue is a continuous and constantly evolving dance. If I knew all the answers we would never have started this and now, with the endless possibilities of life I cannot bear to stop talking. Speaking of who we truly are now, quietly, in the corners of rooms or across the distance that will grow for a while before we pull the threads of ourselves back together again.
Every beginning has an end, and every end, a beginning…
Copyright: Samantha Ledger
I heard her whisper this as she woke in the morning, as the sun shone through lace and rag strung from a window to mask the emptiness outside.
Have you never felt this way. Yes, always. Until the fear was silenced and I could hear the sound of birds singing as dusk.
Why do we feel guilt as the ropes that entwine us to each other tighten. My brother does not know the name of children, does not know their faces. I have studied his too close for comfort and am now struck by the irony of missing what was once had and is now lost. We are easily discarded when the rain begins to fall. The grass become greener. They ask you not to swim in a thunder storm but you do it anyway, or else you miss the beauty of the light beneath the waves. Waves created by your own movement, by the living mechanics of your body. We are free under water, suffocated of air, removed from confines and rules and rituals. Comb your hair one hundred times and always kiss goodnight the people that love you.
Tell me what love is, tell her. Tell us both and explain how we lost our way through the woods as the sun was burning at sundown.
There are only so many shadows deep enough to hide a child, even less to conceal a woman and I have grown now. Grown in size without dragging the infant behind me. I am not her mother, why should I care if she is left behind. No one liked her anyway, and the quaint beauty serves as a punishment after we have said our prayers of an evening. Seething with a rage I knew (you know it too) she burnt the house down without even lighting a match. You can deny things as much as you want but the stains of sulphur are on the tip of your tongue. Explain the mechanics of that is you can.
We are running and running far from here, we are running and running to the sea.
Come lay with me upon the sand, let it wash over your nakedness. I see you as you see me, fully clothed. I see into the promises that were broken and the kisses that were given to someone else. No woman is all miracle, and every heart can be broken. May we ride the ivory elephant back to the tower and never come down. But you so rightly say that we would miss the songbirds of a morning. I look into your eyes and see the salt flooding them. See the sea of grief washing over you. Who has died. No one and yet everyone, to you we are all living dead and even then you do not stop loving.
I saw you yesterday knelt amongst dead wood on the shore, clutching it to your chest and screaming into the howling wind. I haven’t the heart to ask you to do it where I can see and hear because part of me wants the secret to remain unspoken. Wrap your arms around me and I shall envelop you in my own. They can take the weight now, they can take the rocking of the boat in the storm. My mouth is dry as I taste the air, taste the turning of the wind and the coming of the rain. You stare casually at my ring finger and I at yours. One dressed, the other bare. How dare those we love leave us when we are still in love with them. How cruel. And what purpose does it possibly serve.
A servant said that to her mistress and I know the meaning was lost as the wind drew the sounds of the words from her lips. There are so many new faces, how can I ever remember their names. We turn over and over in the breaking of the waves. Everyone else wants to be saved, to be safe on the shore. You and I, she, you, me, us the collective feminine long to return to the water. Snared in our own day dream. Kelp and cuttle fish.
I sit here with you and realise in the warm afternoon sun I am living a cliche, caught in a day dream. For all this is unspoken between us two. For in all our words we have said everything and then nothing, for dialogue is a continuous and constantly evolving dance. If I knew all the answers we would never have started this and now, with the endless possibilities of life I cannot bear to stop talking. Speaking of who we truly are now, quietly, in the corners of rooms or across the distance that will grow for a while before we pull the threads of ourselves back together again.
Every beginning has an end, and every end, a beginning…
Copyright: Samantha Ledger
Thunder
Late at night you can hear the sound, I don't know where it comes from or when it will come.
Rushing across a landscape draped in shadows, gorse and heather. The soil sandy,
nothing takes root too long or too deeply. it aides escape while giving the impression
of commitment. To the cause, to the lover you lay with through the dark hours into
the exposing violence of a new day ripping across the sky. Tolling bells sound from a church
in the village. Built, burnt, built, pillaged, plundered. And that was just the priests and Christians. Domestic violence. We must always war against faith when we are fearful of our own beliefs.
Humanity is a violent word.
I can taste your fear as I lick the sweat from your brow. This is an expression of love. You
say it is an countenance of affection, love bites, love bruises. To discern the difference is to
question your sanity. I have desire but courage abandoned me as we crossed the waters into your homeland. I have no sanctity here, heathens are burnt at the stake. Burn me, turn me. I am a believer. Never leave her, or him.
You are sexless here in this space. Reflection turns us opaque. We have spoken of the ocean of noise across which loves lies have spread, an oil slick thick and heavy lines my stomach. No amount of scrubbing can cure this. Now as I start to find my appetite you begin feeding me roots and nightshade. Our wild garden grows fox gloves and lupins because, you say, you venerate the beauty in death. My body is your cage, you say this in your sleep so I know it must be true.
Dreamers are the free, you have whispered this before, from under your halo, laid beneath the mid afternoon sun. Hawks circle overhead, none are well sized to lift me from here. The cleft are only between the pages of a book I read before you burnt it. Words are useless if they are not your own, I have swallowed them down though. My mouth full with pulp and ink. Absorbed vowels and consonants seep into my blood stream.
There is life in the corpse of a child despite her lack of movement.
Sleeping lion, the danger is always hidden in long grass unseen until you stand upon
it. You collected snakes in a pit dug at the bottom of the garden. I remember now the clang of steel cutting through sods hitting stones. If you had dug deep enough we would have found the bones of the dogs my grandfather buried when I was ten. One died of old age, the other of a broken heart.
I have to feed myself or I keep forgetting, repeating the same lines over and over again until your irritation peaks, pours over me as scolding water. My skin boils as you rage, flame and furnace. You have told me again and again the fire of my sins will rain down on me. My skin peels and lifts, exposing bones clean and white. You move to gnaw on sinews and ligaments because they taste best and provide you the greatest source of nourishment. When did I become your Mother, to be consumed by the tyranny of love.
Skies turn to ash as the humidity pushes down heavy as the dead child you say you found in the east woods sixteen years ago. You said it was in the newspapers, but I was a late learner when it came to reading and my grandmother refused me access to propaganda of the masses. I stand exposed in moors of heather and wild orchids as the reverberating menace rolls closer. My feet have greyed as my toes dig into the sandy earth. You should always ground yourself in a storm. My voice becomes lost in the spaces between the wind. I pray for salvation and rescue. I pray for an ending and absolution. I pray to be struck down for my sins and to never again to be reborn in the arms of my God.
Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013
Rushing across a landscape draped in shadows, gorse and heather. The soil sandy,
nothing takes root too long or too deeply. it aides escape while giving the impression
of commitment. To the cause, to the lover you lay with through the dark hours into
the exposing violence of a new day ripping across the sky. Tolling bells sound from a church
in the village. Built, burnt, built, pillaged, plundered. And that was just the priests and Christians. Domestic violence. We must always war against faith when we are fearful of our own beliefs.
Humanity is a violent word.
I can taste your fear as I lick the sweat from your brow. This is an expression of love. You
say it is an countenance of affection, love bites, love bruises. To discern the difference is to
question your sanity. I have desire but courage abandoned me as we crossed the waters into your homeland. I have no sanctity here, heathens are burnt at the stake. Burn me, turn me. I am a believer. Never leave her, or him.
You are sexless here in this space. Reflection turns us opaque. We have spoken of the ocean of noise across which loves lies have spread, an oil slick thick and heavy lines my stomach. No amount of scrubbing can cure this. Now as I start to find my appetite you begin feeding me roots and nightshade. Our wild garden grows fox gloves and lupins because, you say, you venerate the beauty in death. My body is your cage, you say this in your sleep so I know it must be true.
Dreamers are the free, you have whispered this before, from under your halo, laid beneath the mid afternoon sun. Hawks circle overhead, none are well sized to lift me from here. The cleft are only between the pages of a book I read before you burnt it. Words are useless if they are not your own, I have swallowed them down though. My mouth full with pulp and ink. Absorbed vowels and consonants seep into my blood stream.
There is life in the corpse of a child despite her lack of movement.
Sleeping lion, the danger is always hidden in long grass unseen until you stand upon
it. You collected snakes in a pit dug at the bottom of the garden. I remember now the clang of steel cutting through sods hitting stones. If you had dug deep enough we would have found the bones of the dogs my grandfather buried when I was ten. One died of old age, the other of a broken heart.
I have to feed myself or I keep forgetting, repeating the same lines over and over again until your irritation peaks, pours over me as scolding water. My skin boils as you rage, flame and furnace. You have told me again and again the fire of my sins will rain down on me. My skin peels and lifts, exposing bones clean and white. You move to gnaw on sinews and ligaments because they taste best and provide you the greatest source of nourishment. When did I become your Mother, to be consumed by the tyranny of love.
Skies turn to ash as the humidity pushes down heavy as the dead child you say you found in the east woods sixteen years ago. You said it was in the newspapers, but I was a late learner when it came to reading and my grandmother refused me access to propaganda of the masses. I stand exposed in moors of heather and wild orchids as the reverberating menace rolls closer. My feet have greyed as my toes dig into the sandy earth. You should always ground yourself in a storm. My voice becomes lost in the spaces between the wind. I pray for salvation and rescue. I pray for an ending and absolution. I pray to be struck down for my sins and to never again to be reborn in the arms of my God.
Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013
Monday, 6 May 2013
Time is not linear
It comes and it goes. Water travels upward, I have traced its meandering ascent with my finger. I have been upon a journey of great distance and yet, have moved so very little. Time, I have discovered is not linear, does not follow the rules expected, rules learnt from books.
Symmetry, reality, love, are obscured concepts soaring unhinged from your own mentality. Gravity has had its wicked way with me, then unleashed me form its tormented grasp. Fingers unfurling to reveal the presence of light within its palm. My milk sickly sweet, turned in the heat of self-reflection, the masts of ships coming toward the harbour wavered in the rising heat. My body was burning.
Metamorphosis, transmigration, call it what you will.
This is the final voyage, and the very first. Time is not linear.
My arms will feel unbearably empty without you clasped in them; the rhythm of the world is now dictated by the turning of the axis. I shall inhale your last breathe before me and hold it tender in the darkest corner of my lungs. Breathing then, from here until our future selves convene, only shallowly. This is a lie and then it is not. For I see the frown burrowing across your brow being sown with seeds of displeasure. It is only you I hold internally, the demons have long since dispersed. My own self-administered antibiotic holds back infection. Yes, I will always be a carrier of disease, but this is the beauty of acceptance. I have laid down the cosmic burden, Zeus holds no favour or power in the court of my biology. Matter or maker I cannot say, he is dead and this all we need know of him.
Even God’s fall from heaven to lay upon a pyre, dried leaves a death bed.
There is sunlight cascading down upon my flesh no matter the time of day, it slips through drawn curtains in the thick dead of night to touch me. This is my destiny. We have foretold it in this very room. Now let our prophecy live beyond the stars, reaching down to the folds of fields and woods, across the lake I see from my bedroom window. My future sleeps deeply next to me when I wake, dreaming, delirious with a hunger I cannot abate but feed willingly. The past and present rests her reddened head across the way, singing her songs of learning as her eyes heavy with sleep open to take in the light of another day. As the night descends she counts the stars upon the darkened ceiling of her world. Points with growing fingers to her own constellation.
Cherry blossom lines the path to be travelled, walked bare footed, for it is the only way to know the ground with certainty. My body changes with the mastering of knowing where to step and where to stand. I have grown, fallen back to infancy and grown again. Womanhood, clings to my bones with its curve and lunar effusion. Fear of death does not haunt my womb, unseeded, it is the way. Acceptance rests easily upon the device of my passion. Yes I can plot across my body the written declarations of independence, signed, woven with sealing wax and plasma. Kiss me, not as a lover but as a giver of life, we are two souls entwined. Taste the freedom that spills as the dawn crests upon the shimmering water. I shall continue to sail, to plot out time and freedom but no longer with bailing bucket.
My body has learnt to leave itself ashore as I depart upon my explorations, to remain anchored, as my foothold to this life. I have stopped feeding myself the lies, they hold no nutritional value. I have laid down my weapon of brutality. Come, call me with your ragged sails and compass, come and sing me to the sea. We shall navigate together, equally over the great vastness of life. . Yes, time is not linear but this is our truth.
Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013
Friday, 8 March 2013
Plexus
Make no mistake I keep my enemies close to me, always carry a mirror with me so I can see their reflection. See the reflection of the greatest warrior clothed as I am clothed, with intimations as mine. Speak mimic. This is the constant rise and fall, this is the fall out of consequence. My mouth is a gun, I have no inclination for Russian roulette, lest I forget the long road we have travelled from there to here. Hear the declaration of insolence written on the body. Written under the star kissed skies.
We wake to drums in the distance, calling workers to their labour, wives away from husbands and children from the embrace of family. There are bricks to be made in the wilderness. Men to their knees in water digging clay with spades, the mechanics of industry do not reach this far. Plumes of smoke rise up from the kilns, fired constantly for years. Home fires may have cooled, to damp ash, shovelled by infants whose mothers stack damp kindling wet with tears. There is a pretty violet bruise painted under her left eye. My finger touches the swelling. There is too much noise, the grating, hammering violence against the earth. Kiln pond is stained by the wealth of London. We built her here before she rose in stacks, chimneys and towers.
The cold seeps into you, gentle at first, so not to rouse suspicion. Clings to the internal rafters of your being spinning intricate webs of hoarfrost. The cellular design of my person is not inclined to withstand your violence, I have no knowledge of who built me or how. I have not long known the mechanics of biology. Did you speak my name across the meadows before I walked to where you laid. Pine cones lay as litter, my feet have learnt to mould around their shape. I tried eating them but found their bitterness to similar to the love my Mother fed me. We are all starved of something, the trick is to know what you are missing and where to forage to find your own sense of sustenance.
I suspect it is an unhappy machine that carves the land with its broken iron teeth. Or an unhappy woman that carves the flesh from her skin with the paring knife while peeling potatoes. Our reality, is diluted as it runs from us into dirty water full of peelings. There is only so much we can carve ourselves before we hit bone. Then we are faced with the truth white and solid, knitted with calcium, connective tissue that feeds the source from the source. We are cannibalistic in our transfiguration. My father picks his teeth the rib of a rabbit whose neck he broke to feed us as the ground cursed the sky. Cloudless the unsympathetic midwinter came heavy and lay for months across the fields. Birds descend frozen from beech trees long stripped of their leave.
My fingers wrapped in plastics bags for the warmth of sweat laid them out one by one upon the pyre of imagination. Often I have burnt myself with its delirium. Their wings I unpinned from the ground, staked with pine needles my brother had stabbed through their mechanism of locomotion. How can they fly when welded to the loam. Even in death his violence could not retreat to allow grief to swell and spirits to find their own destination. Each head I kissed, damp lips fusing to feathers. I had so little language I could not muster a prayer and my faith had long departed with the warmth of summer. Some had lost legs upon falling, I fashioned new limbs from twigs, sized to proportions.
They cannot walk and I cannot fly. Why is remembering always washed in the blue tone of winter, when our internal axis tilts furthest from the conviviality of the sun.
Copyright:Samantha Ledger 2013
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