The Howl

She gives her everything and then nothing, holding the full weight of her heart in a mouth.

At night the silver birch illuminated by the full moon moved with a rhythmic ebb of a river running from itself. Running to a greater sense of goodness that only a sea could promise. She etched upon her back the coordinates of home, and ran red ribbon from it to her heart. Tied with a double loop and sealed with wax. The needle is kept under the skin of her left palm. This way she is always closer to her God.

It grew under the exposed delirium of night and came to be birthed in the first light of a morning on a Saturday. Houses laid silent among the hedgerows and the scent of chlorine wafted in the air. Only one other woke as the birds descended to dance in long grasses. The nightjars had become silent.

Burning coasted on clouds of dust. She lifted her head from the cooled ground to sponge the watery dew from her lips. Ferns clung to her pale skin leaving their delicate veiny imprint on her face. If she listened closely, she swore the sound of God was about her, the sound of the sea raging with her infantile womanhood. This is the substance of visions and delirious veracity. Feverish the earth moved within her. The broken thing, yet to emerge rested on the tip of her nose. Let the earth invade crevices. Let her bury it, let her entomb the conquest within the concavity of her childish ways.

It would emerge soon, dancing upon the rays of light that filtered, fractured, through the chestnut tress heavy with the burden of their fruit. Soon the fields would fills with many hands to make light the heavy work of harvest. Unmissed, time was hers, to ravage the shore of her imagination, to search for driftwood to build her cross. Let her be crucified and resurrected. Say a prayer and all is forgiven. Suffering is selfish when driven by redemption. Everyone longs to be loved.

Hands cupped together, they catch her as it falls like rain. Searing from the sky to drown the seed and she, no Noah, cannot bail fast enough to stop the rivulets of the sin running away. She dug the hole to bury them. To keep from view herself, and another. The horror of the morning and the night. To lay to rest the dreams that had long run into waking. Chestnuts fell from the skies split in two upon rocks sprawling open the pregnant state of fertility. Scorched by the sun, dried to hardened flesh they rotted soon enough, back from where they came. Not every seed becomes a tree. This much is true and she learnt as witness to the horror. Her own part she played and played it well.

There are many promises made across blood lines. Each one has been smeared colloquially by fingers and thumb. A bed, unmade tells many tales and the shadows hold onto the sounds trapped there. Her voice lower and deeper, is animalistic. Hear how the rabbits howl.

Anyone can be a refugee, in their own country, in their own family, in their own hearts. How far you travel for salvation depends on how unforgivable the sin. There are only so many lies that can be told until the truth is spoken.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

Passion of the blood

Spiders spin their ancient web of sin and salty incubi. Expectancy rests in the bud of their abdomen. The contrast of a true masochist is that he sees his endeavours as a mean to an end.

He flogs the broom of nettles across her back, digging deep into the open wound of her femininity. Her fingers bleed with a death grip. A single bloody tear trickles from her lips. A silent prayer loses itself in stale air of an enclosed space. Not all sarcophaguses are marked with a name and date of death.  Some are merely rooms within rooms whose occupants are still breathing. Cobwebs cling to the corners of rotting windows, paint peeling from wood. Histamines sink deeply into skin. The flagrant air of desire and sweat lifts from two bodies broken in an anfractuous dance. Passion of the blood.

Compliance is no matter for intellectual debate. It is the unjust duelling of brutally with another’s heart. He ate hers. Upon his workbench are rusted screws and unused tools and whiskey bottles carelessly hidden. Oil stains the carpet, the slick of morality. Mortality embedded itself into the lining of her flesh, internal. The lullabies of childhood silenced.

Catkins hang pregnant, swaying gentle of a heated breeze of summer. The iridescent green of newly strung life is beginning to turn under the oppressive gaze of the solar flare. Realities slip further away with the madness of summer. The oppression of learning is not long enough forgotten.

She cast herself into the water, headfirst from the stones steps. A glory of weightlessness overwhelmed the sensation of capture. The magnolia tree cast its shadow in the corner of the pool of water, petals peeling in surrender to the sun. Water flooded her mouth, cleansing the pallet of sound and substance. It is the beginning of a love affair. How many times do you have to drown yourself before you learn to swim. How much brutality must your taste before you see the beauty of violence.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

the dark umbilicus

Fragments of light change as we pass through space and time.

Dance phosphorescence, to your own iridescent melody. The memory of who we have been fades quietly into the silence, some of us have more to say than others. This is a universal veracity of biology. The mute girl articulates in a language of glances and ravenous leer cast towards the distance. Or fingers have touched the void of humanity and passed back again to the reality we have spun for ourselves.

Love lingers in the recesses of hope. Until hope consumes itself within the flames of famine. We are the dark umbilicus. Rain soaks the deck of our ship as we cast away from all we have known. There is a pronounced vulnerability in staying as there is in voyaging into the foreign. My mother stands but does not smile, her face fixed for fear of emotion. I have transcended beyond her body to my own. There is a sense of redundancy about her shoulders. We all make choices. Mine are no different from her own.

My fingers ache with disuse, I have not mastered the state of idleness and my dreams screech violently of a distracted mind. Not all love needs confirmation, not all love ends with heartbreak. This is a lesson she has not learnt and time has conspired against her. Not every ship will dash against the rocks, with all her crew dragged by sirens to their sandy beds. Above, circles the wings of an eagle, never seen so close to shore. The shrill call of the wild reverberates in bone marrow, my teeth have aged with my tongue. My lexicon is all I have.

Where are the colloquial maxims, where have they been. Long gone from these parched lips. Dehydration brings beautification of hallucinations. Delirium sweetly seeps. The navigator has left her post, my well wishes kissed upon her forehead. We are only alone when we are surrounded by those we love.
I am to journey anew, as sure as sanguinary is in my blood. I only hope, I remember where I can find my hearts sanctuary.




Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

the instinct of discovery

Across the ocean sails my body, led to worlds of dreamscapes. Internal rests a compass needle pointed to my own north. Hallucinogenic fever has passed, clouds dissevered to invite shards of light to irradiate the sky.

I am sailing home to a land I have never sojourned. My feet have not touched its littoral, my eyes not cast across its panorama. But it is home.

We are wonderers, explorers, fearless and fascinated. Time has stood still to allow us this inexhaustible journey. Life travels back and forth within us, we are static yet in constant oscillation.

This is real life, this is living.

Love rocks me to a gentle slumber, tucks my head into the nape of its neck. I am bourn upon waves to the past, to the future. I am everything I am and all I shall be.

This is the instinct of discovery.


Copyright:Samantha Ledger 2013

Shards of light

I. Dawn. 

 

The negative inversion of light changes, charges. That face, unbearably frail, had once held fractiously reflected images of their former selves.  Sense the sensation of fear, it precipitates in bone marrow; from limb to limb she ravages herself in cannibalistic rituals. Consuming the consumptive, it is the nature of inhumane dreams. She drank the elixir of his aged passion and found she gagged on the truth presented in her hallucinogenic state.

 

A stench of diesel lingers in the caliginous air, the unelemental nature of their love burns behind her left eye, a sensation of electrocution. The executioner wears a red dress. If they were to be bookish and return to the first principle, the breath he had just taken was meaningless. It does not exist. Nor does hers. Therefore her veracity can take on a more violent nature. He took his aim, she was unarmed and guarded not the path to her heart. It is marked for his blade or arrow, or the slingshot so favoured in his infantile period.

 

The grass around the edges of the lake is overgrown, time stood still only for her.  Captured her long enough to leave her behind in the bending shards of light cascading from a mouth of a lover she did not take. Passed down, faulted eugenics with silver tongues, silent promises and leather. They bequeathed her something of flesh and bone to remember them by; it calls her name in the mimicking tone of her once sequestered voice.

 

This is how it is.

 

Raise her from the furrowed glebe, to revolute in the luminescence of dawn. Make her not ethereal inside the plasmatic constellation. Her night has retreated, she is conscious in the defiant birth of her own aurora borealis.

 

II. Noon.

 

They crossed the celestial meridian at dusk and then again at noon, as the light pitched down from the heavens with the calefaction of Satan. She knew it was the serpent from the taste on her lips, the fat pink thumb that brushed at the stain was not her own. Sex is good for the body, truth is good for the soul. So it is written on the leaves of the trees that shade the fortunate. Beneath their feet the voices of heathens sang out, each footprint leaving an indelible mark upon the skin of an unborn infant. The shins of weaker women split open, exposing bone shards to air. There is a folk tale, passed from mouth to mouth that tells tales of those that have walked in the midday sun.

 

Mad dogs ran themselves ragged as he foamed at the mouth. If you drink freely from the fountain you will pay the consequence. They taught this at school before milk, she drank it down thirstily. She is the water bearer, but the elders have yet to realise the strength of character sequestered under her breast plate. A pain stabs in her middle finger having spent too long pouring over ancient texts in a language no longer spoken. Above her stand a figure carved of iron, bone, swathed in a blanket of flesh. He watches her decipher each syllable, kisses her full on the mouth in reward. Some punishments are metered out with love. Some only wear it as a disguise.

 

In his calloused hands, black with soot from the bags long slung over his shoulder, he holds her heart. The kettle whistles early calling the workers too tea. Old women kneel in the grate of an open fire plying kindling with paraffin, lest the devil should forget to send a spark to burn out the sin. Every child’s flesh will burn if touched by the fingertips of evil, unless she has already tainted herself. Then her hair shall be knotted with violets and ivy ready for her marriage to her mother’s father. To return to the source is the only cure. Everyone knows this. Oral language is stronger than the mutterings of the church. The priest no longer knocks at their door.

 

His teeth are missing as he smiles, takes her hands and walks her to the shade of dreamscapes. Opens her mouth to pour in the elixir from a dusty jar sat on the handmade bench. Reminds her again, that he built it with his own two hands, flexing the muscles in his arm. Not all threats are overt. Not all love is precious. In the distance reverberations of life mingle with one another in the torridity, coexisting, consuming one another until joined, a cacophony of silence clouds their bodies from view. God said he witnesses everything, but her God is not that of the parables told in Christ’s house. His teeth glisten white from inside the jar. Drink of his body, drink, drink, drink. Only Alice had the good fortune of growing in size.

 

Down into the rabbit hole she falls, down into anatomical penitence.

 

III. Dusk.

 

How did Noah know the rounded earth would flood? How can something circular swell until it bursts unless someone pricks it with a sharpened screw. People long believed the earth was flat, in which case, flooding would be impossible. Torrents of raging fluid would course towards the edges only to cascade into the cosmos. Lost. Forever. She was not Noah and did not know there was a flood to come. The burning animalistic craving of the day eased with the setting of the sun, the burning sensation of her flesh subsided less. The holy one retreated to the bottom of a bottle that did not contain a ship, sails unfurled, it held nothing. He too was empty, of regret, or guilt. A spent force waiting to again muster desire.

 

She slunk into the shadows as she had seen other animals do. Unlatched the window with a broken finger and dropped bare footed onto the cooling ground. As her bare feet padded across the parched grass clouds of dust wafted around her. Earth to earth. You cannot know what you are not taught, innocence is heavy burden when a body has been heaved into the romanticism of others.

 

Under the branches of a chestnut tree, leaves singed by the sun, she dug, until her fingers wore to the quick. Licking them, the metallic taste reminded her of a forgotten dream, relived to often to be erased wholly from memory. We fall back to what we know. In the trough she crouched, blackened knees under her chin. From across the meadows the sounds of slumber rolled like thunder. Stars pricked the sky, she waited for it to bleed a midnight blood. None was to come, not until morning.

 

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 

Biological Contrition

The biological references are falling away, peeling from the new skin that has grown beneath the fraying symptom of regrowth. The crooked branches of the trees seen from my window serve as a reminder, a reprimand to grown toward the sun. Never looking now at where we have stemmed from. This is a lesson hard learned. My limbs have been sheered only to grow back incorrectly countless times. The wood cutter knows me by name and the smell of my sap.

The leaves of winter have not been swept and now have begun to rot and fume their pungent stench of decay. It’s appalling to know how much life lives within the caucus of death, feasting on the remains of former glory. The rain washes down the smoke stained wall but does not remove the soot blackness.  Moss crawls slowly into crevasses in the hope no one notices it silent march towards conflict. There is something pernicious about its softness.

It seems I cannot be drawn from biology. Eternally I shall measure myself by the pulse of my own internal function. By the birth of humanity in the creation of a cell. And it’s death, through the destruction we inflict upon the innocent and impeded. We are only at the top of the food chain because we have harnessed the power of cruelty. We hunt for the pleasure of the kill, the rush and flood of blood to the surface. Some of us at least. My own body longs to lay across man traps to absorb the rust into my own blood stream, not as a martyr, more in an act of contrition.

Who are the dreamers and where have they gone, too far for all we have witnessed and the howling echoes inside the empty cavity of a heartbroken chest. The two bickering women become a droning sound in my ear as I focus on the horizon, watching the day slip further from view. Why do we face west, why never east. The moon turns upon itself to show us her shadowed face, there are, it seems reasons she keeps this side of her concealed. Deeply pitted and scarred I long to touch it, but my fingers do not reach that distance. Her haunting inhumanity dictates seclusion. How lonely to wake alone each night, how vulnerable to have the world watching your nakedness. We have all become voyeurs. Even me. Even you.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2013

Love for Sale

Love for sale is all she sings of. I hear it over the airwaves drifting hauntingly up the stairs. The function of my mind has fractured and words, dull and meaningless seep out. There exists always the fear that this will become a constant state of being. For too soon we find our place in the world only to lose it again. I have never known exhaustion such as this. Dreams have an unnerving familiarity about them, lead me to, when waking, question their veracity. Is this my reality or myth. A creation of an overactive imagination. No one answers when I call out to the emptiness of the night. Someone has left the search light on outside, it shines into my bedroom. How can I be the one they are looking for. I am too grown and my sex is all wrong.

My romanticism drifts aimlessly looking for a shore on which to anchor itself.  Sacred voices lilt between trees on a cold March morning, wafting through a deep set mist that has not lifted for days. Our feet are damped by steps towards the cemetery where remains lay untouched and unloved. We do not convene here for purposes of morning. The sun has yet to break the sky, to crack the atmospheric stance the clouds have assumed. Deep and rich plumes of emptiness. We forget the electricity contained with. We are all a source of kinetics. My movements are considered, poised, in my attempt to retain a dignity not afforded to me. Around my ankle rests the burn and bruise from the shackles of spent love. They have prepared the long boat, I heard this said, decked with garlands of meadow flowers and dried dead wood from the silver birches field at the end of summer.
We were innocent in the heat, draped in love and secrecy.

Confession. Father. Hear my confession. Do not turn your face from here towards the skies looking for answers that you know, soulfully, will not come. Do not seek the woman who bore me to offer your solace in her arms, they are spent with the weight of another. Do you not listen to her words when she sleeps, the sound carries along to where I lay as clear as the bells calling me to church. Faith belongs in flesh not matrimony. Some lessons are learnt too late but I have practiced forgiveness and offer you mine, untainted, without condition. This is love.

What words would I part with, if I held no fear of shame in my mouth. Do they need be said at all, for I have seen you at midnight, stood sentinel at my window. It is too late now, too late to charge as my saviour. The damage has been done. Punishments have rained down in heavy blows against sanity and skin. Only the scars remain and you confuse the perpetrator for she look and sounds identical to me. Puppeteers have passed, by the marionette still dances, like a limb still moves even when severed from a body.

I walk slowly, through fear and concentration. Finally, in this moment I have learnt the art of mindfulness. My tongue explores the taste of air, of possibility that exists even when we believe there is none. Smoke rises in the distance, they have lit their torches in readiness for the burning, in readiness for my skin to flail from my bones in some exotic dance. For them this is the ending.

We choose only to see what we wish to see.

Death is not an ending when we are still breathing at the core, this is not my first, second or third exodus. I have parted from my body every night in your absence under the ferocious gaze of another. But see me. I am still here. I am reborn. Our parting of ways occurred only to serve our reunion. My own voice spurred the inquisition, my own declaration of guilt, though innocence quelled the spilling of further blood. My own. I am not a martyr. Hold me in no esteem.

Only love me as you do, as I see through the thinning fog and emerging daylight. Dawn, in all is glory plays out its role for me. Offering passion diluted before midday draws me close to the flame. Watch me Daddy I am dancing. Love me for now, I long to be loved, across the divided expanse of wasteland, stitched with my inexperienced hand.  The Spanish guitars are playing. Walk not behind in grief for what we have lost, or ahead leading me to where you believe safety awaits. My destiny is my own, uncertain and open for interpretation. Walk with me there, to the harbour where I set sail, aflame in all my feminine glory, walk with me as an equal, sexless and free. As a father and daughter, as we are written upon my heart to be.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 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

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

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

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

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

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

Larkspur & Sulphur

The ambition for freedom broke out of my heart the moment his broken calloused hands wrapped around mine bidding me farewell. Well wishes with a tone of defence and ego tasted bitter on my tongue as they passed into my mouth, across my lips. He has rowed and rowed his way from across the continent, which seems odd considering it is mostly land, speckled with mountain ranges and olive groves.  Perhaps he has a fear of horses or is too tall to straddle the tamed beast.  His linguistics hum in his upper resonating chamber, close around themselves giving his voice that clipped, stunted foreign sound. We have always been fearful of foreigners, who wear our ways and customs but hold deep within themselves a sense of contempt. I see his contempt and he knows it. This has gone unspoken for what seems like a life time, our battle wearied bodies would drip with sweat had we not fought in verbal bouts. The inflection contained the violence. Everyone saw is, no one spoke.

When I was a child travellers with their unwashed and unschooled children used to settle in the meadows, before the silver birch saplings grew too high and thick. Plumes of smoke would rise from small fires, with copper kettles resting on white hot coals. I used to smuggle biscuits to the horse tied to his metal steak driven into the soft ground. Round and round he ambled until the earth shone through the thinned grass. It's strange the fear you have of freedom, or is the fear of recrimination from your captors should you attempt escape. He stayed when he could have pulled that rod of iron from that sod. I remained silent when I could have spoken up. A wash of exhaustion floods you when fighting to survive from sunrise to sunset. Or dusk till dawn. Unimaginable are the horrors that lurk in the shadows cast by daylight, as disturbing as those decaying in the depth of night.  My Mother said, never to speak to them, the women, the children, never the men. They used to come to us for water, from the outside tap, filling their plastic gallon barrels. There is only so far popularity will carry you before the neighbours patience wears thin. But we were the only house that never had anything stolen. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

How do you discern one from the other across the rising haze of a hot summer day. Grass, tinder dry holds a threatening menace not seen in spring. Everyone walks as a collective, holding their breath fearing an exhalation will cause the fatal spark.

It spreads like wildfire. a plague, and each of us is tainted by the sulphur and soot.

Love burns under your skin so its scars cannot be seen by the naked eye. Not until you peel back your flesh for examination. He says there should always be examination.  But I'm starting to wonder how many different ways can you say the same thing. It is the same story, no matter what accent you tell it in. And it’s always the ends of the words that suffer, that are left out, left behind on the class room floor. Left to be swept by the aged caretaker that you have been told you are related too. This makes him dangerous. He cuts up oranges and apples for children to share at playtime with a paring knife. This would not happen now. Clearly I am carbon dating myself. Would you believe I am old enough to have schooled when the desks were still wooden with flip tops and ink wells. Perhaps we were just less progressive that other places. Stuck in the wrong decade. Or the right one.

We walked in the cool of the morning, shoes polished, through the woods and down a lane heavy with catkins and larkspur. Toward the promise of an education. Yet I never mastered the written word or read a book beginning to end. My shy simplicity provoked a tut and shrug, without the question of why. At the end of spring, when it was warm enough we walked to the marsh, removed our shoes and socks to wade ankle deep in clear water. My mother stood at the edge with an open
bag as we scoped handfuls of sopping wet moss. They used to lay it over open wounds, until it grew itself into the skin, growing over the torn flesh. The traveller women told me one night when I slipped from my bed to sleep in the safety of a sweaty and sooted chest of hot flesh and love. You needed no biology to earn salvation. No God. They were the pirates of landmass and wastelands.

The cries are the night jar mingled with the screams of a vixen caught in meadow abandoned by the travellers, her body wrapped in barbed wire. The horse still walked in circles maddening itself back to sanity. Old and knackered they could have sold it for glue. I could have stuck my drawing into my school book without ever knowing. Something’s are better left to fall into disgrace, to crumble into a shadow of what it once was. We are all broken images of ourselves, stuck back together with horse glue and stories or promises we made to ourselves. To others; our lovers, our children.

My memories are held in glass jars, lined up with hand written labels collecting dust on a shelf. Every so often I pluck one between my fingers and bring it down for examination, to watch it dance in its airless space to a composition I cannot hear. It is through glass I can observe its beauty, even if its magnificence is dangerous and foreboding. The urge to unscrew its lid to insert bare fingers has passed. I can appreciate it for what it is or once was, a paradigm of self, and with that knowledge I can put if back on the shelf.

Copyright:Samantha Ledger 2013