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Linda Hogan Page 2
Mercy,
the Word
How I miss the animals of the ocean, in the depths that can’t be measured of my heart, deeper than water, or a universe of dark matter. I want mercy in this world and I miss the trees that are daily falling, the birds here too early to survive, but not the lies of our time. There is something wrong with me because seeing the suffering makes me weep and then I write these words. What I really wish to write is a love poem to ocean, tree, bird, a lover, not to condemn soldiers who follow orders sworn to a nation instead of the demands of compassion. You know, I tell people, earth has the grace to create caves of shining crystal and shifting dunes, mountains with waters falling from them. Water has the blessing of skin left always unbroken, never scarred. I need mercy to make life that easy in this world. If not that, I need to harden my edges
but mercy is a word
that leaves me open instead.
When the Body
When the body wishes to speak, she will
reach into the night and pull back the rapture of this growing
root
which has little faith in the other planets of the universe,
knowing
only one, by the bulbs of the feet, their branching of toes. But
the feet
have walked with the bones of their ancestors over long trails
leaving behind the roots of forests. They walk on the ghosts
of all that has gone before them, not just plant, but animal,
human,
the bones of even the ones who left their horses to drink at the
spring running through earth’s mortal body which has much to
tell
about what happened that day.
When the body wishes to speak from the hands, it tells
of how it pulled children back from death and remembered every
detail
washing the children’s bodies, legs, bellies, the delicate lips
of the girl,
the vulnerable testicles of the son,
the future of my people who brought themselves out of the river
in a spring freeze. That is only part of the story of hands
that touched the future.
This all started so simply, just a body with so much to say,
one with the hum of her own life from in a quiet room,
one of the root growing, finding a way through stone,
one not remembering nights with men and guns,
nor the ragged clothing and broken bones of my body.
I must go back to the hands, the thumb that makes us human,
but then other creatures use tools and lift what they need,
intelligent all, like the crows here, one making a cast of earth
clay
for the broken wing of the other, remaining
until it healed, then broke the clay and flew away together.
I would do that one day,
but a human can make no claims
better than any other, especially without wings, only hands
that don’t know these lessons.
Still, think of the willows
made into a fence that began to root and leaf,
then tore off the wires as they grew.
A human does throw off bonds if it can, if it tries, if it’s
possible,
the body so finely a miracle of its own, created of the elements
and anything that lived on earth where everything that was
still is.
Body Lying Down Lying down outside, my body holds up the sky, the breasts small mountains I see for all the milk they gave, sweetness that drew all to it. I love the flatness of the belly, once close against others, bone touching bone breasts to other flesh, legs wrapped about the hips of another. Those days, where are they and should they be gone only because my hair is the silver mane of that moon, the mountain with snow on top, the metallic mane of horse standing outside my window, having grown with me these years in our friendship and life, or is it the richness of my hands' geography, their lines with stories of labor, scars of fire, the comforting of children, the hands that had the first hold on my granddaughter, Vivian, for life force, her black hair visible already in the womb where I first saw her. Oh there may be poverty of the purse but I am wealthy, even unwoven as I am, not in the warp of others, the woof of linen or silk, not that kind of smooth fabric, not their world but simply cotton worked in old fields once, fields so like this body, lying flat here, red, taking from the world, opening, having some of life plucked from me, all the while making it into another.
© Copyright, 2015,
Linda Hogan. |