Weeping willows bend like maidens in mourning,
their long green hair brushing the strawberry sands.
Pink sugar drifts across the dunes,
sweet as breath against my neck,
sweet as the way grief softens before it breaks.
Children laugh in the far distance.
Balloons rise toward the bruised sky
like prayers too heavy for heaven.
We sink into her waiting body
and she folds us into her shadowed embrace.
Her heat gathers around our skin
until our breaths mingle,
until our longing curls together like vines.
Come to me, my beloved ones.
Her voice is the oldest music I know.
It moves through me like warm smoke,
like fingers tracing the inside of my soul.
She draws us deeper into her womb of soil
and I feel the pulse of her heart under my palms.
a tree of moonlight crowned in sorrow.
Her branches open in blessing.
Her roots drip with ancestral memory.
Do no harm to the body that holds you.
Do no harm to the Mother who bore you.
Moose walk from the mist like ancient guardians.
Deer bow their crowned heads in reverence.
Snow falls in glittering spirals
as if she herself is kissing us through the cold.
Her sobs tremble through the ground
and I kneel at her roots, whispering,
Because the land remembers love you have forgotten.
Because my body has been wounded.
Because my children turned from me
and I have been alone for too long.
and they never learned to carry me.
a hot red ache blooming behind my ribs.
I press my forehead to her bark
The world shakes itself apart.
The sand beneath me opens like a mouth.
but the earth pulls me down
where only the warmth of her love
and the memory of your hands
still burn against my skin.
amandla
theartofmadeline
titsay
2087
ellievsbear