I didn’t mean to let my fingers slip. I had my life gathered in salt-stained glass jars, laced with coffee-grind drifters and blood-thrifted stress. I’m standing in shatters I haven’t swept, lost in sharp seas with no land in sight. Please slow down.
You asked me if I believe. I’m not sure after all my sister and I have endured. What made You stay so far away from Your friend and us in our dismay? Yet one truth I know despite the pain: I know my brother will rise again.
The sunlit world is all aglow while shafts of golden brightness find the dust of diamonds on the snow. But darker seem the lines of shade—long lines of shadow on my mind. The peace seems ruffled by my tread, the sunlight turned to bitter glare: ablaze the snow, yet cold and dead, the shining diamond dust is dulled with tarnishes of twisted care.
Love begins and never ends. Love is, with justice never distant, raveled and unraveled, here, everywhere. No departed utterance, it endures beyond sounds…
I feel the silent march of time like a glacier crawling, haltingly, toward an open and unknown sea, the gulls’ joyful weeping haunting me under the wintry brilliance of sun and the piercing sky.
I never meant to bring you along to this cliff, but still, here we sit, watching the tide roll in. The sun sets in the vast emptiness, and I wonder if you know this isn’t a detour, rather, the journey. I fretted over this future a while ago; I almost didn’t accept in hopes you wouldn’t know that this is the place it was all going to lead up to. I hope that someday when you look back on it all, you don’t convince yourself I misled you all the way here.
While I’m waiting, I am distilling neon signs in a drop of rain, nearby the rushing of the world’s many neurons, held by the weight of stillness: the back and forth and back of this daily game of hide-and-seek.
Stories from all over the world hold that wayfarers, especially sailors, often got tattoos of swallows. It was, after all, the swooping swallows against the blue sky they would see well before they could see familiar shores. Swallows meant they were home. When I got my first tattoo, I already had a foot in Costa Rica and Georgia. I was coming to terms with the hard truth that having made a home in two countries meant I’d never “come home” without leaving another.
After the longest dry season, you pour yourself into the cracks in the clay and your overflowing, lasting long after the clouds have passed us by, is the color green. Hope, after so many days wondering when you might arrive, that the days of the hunger season are numbered. That tomorrow I will not ache from sowing in dry ground.
Sister, I see your arms are trembling. Brother, I see your tears, your stone-set face, how this fire rattling in your bones, shut up no longer, has burned you in the telling.
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