A Raven's Song Breaks the Night
It is a subtle craft, one the Indian sages knew quite well. If they put their ear to the earth, what would they hear? The secret palm that beats the infinite drum. Those sounds forever resounding- their vibrations beating like pulses in our stomachs when we were children laying belly to the ground, our ripe skin flattening the grass. And yet we’d laugh, oblivious to the omnipotence that pervaded us. We knew nothing of rhythm then, only that we yearned to dance.
Now I am twenty two, with my ear pressed to the dirt of the earth, straining through my ever deafening age to hear just once that sacred hum. My youth has somehow sunken into my pours, and though it has not yet traced its patterned lines across my face, I am beginning to feel the thickening of time just below the surface.
I have danced the mambo. I have learned to roll my hips and ease my steps with grace on oversized feet. The rhythm of it I am beginning to inherit through the strands of womanhood. But still I cannot hear the sounds that make the body move, the soul quiver, and the tongue leap to speak.
From time to time as I reflect on this mystery that continues to elude me, that ghost that tugs at the edges of my shadows, I sense it is something I cannot simply reach out to and capture. It’s begging a journey of me, calling always from just beyond the bend where I cannot see. It wants me to follow it. Somewhere beneath the lid of the universe, where I stand at its opening and hesitate with every breath. To go inside would be to leave the world behind. And somehow I’ve grown vines that have attached me to where I stand. The girl who always believed in death and change...
Now I am twenty two, with my ear pressed to the dirt of the earth, straining through my ever deafening age to hear just once that sacred hum. My youth has somehow sunken into my pours, and though it has not yet traced its patterned lines across my face, I am beginning to feel the thickening of time just below the surface.
I have danced the mambo. I have learned to roll my hips and ease my steps with grace on oversized feet. The rhythm of it I am beginning to inherit through the strands of womanhood. But still I cannot hear the sounds that make the body move, the soul quiver, and the tongue leap to speak.
From time to time as I reflect on this mystery that continues to elude me, that ghost that tugs at the edges of my shadows, I sense it is something I cannot simply reach out to and capture. It’s begging a journey of me, calling always from just beyond the bend where I cannot see. It wants me to follow it. Somewhere beneath the lid of the universe, where I stand at its opening and hesitate with every breath. To go inside would be to leave the world behind. And somehow I’ve grown vines that have attached me to where I stand. The girl who always believed in death and change...