Spirit Barrier

Spirit Barrier

I remember it all
the human flood
the empty chair
the calf crying
before a growling wind
lost histories leaking
through the spirit barrier
a delta of pain
draining into
a bayou of suffering.

I awake beneath
the magpie'’s beak
see it reach
for my eye
see the world
turn red and black
and white and fade.
This is not death
these quills
brushing against my breast.
I am smudged and washed
and swaddled
in the stiffening sheen
of my own blood
and readied for flight.

asha


I wrote this poem last spring. At the time I was disturbed by the some of its images but left them in because the poem insisted on it. The drawing is an excerpt from something I also did about the same time. The imagery in both is violent, but necessarily so, as they describe the time when light must find us because we cannot find it. In the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita it no longer seems exaggerated.