If you said today

Run away

I’d reply

I’m too old of heart for taking chances

And yet

If I could leave behind

These footprints of hell

I’d turn my bag inside out

Leave the clothes that made me and now don’t fit

They can hang on tree limbs for another girl

Who hankers after fushia and magnolia

If you can live without

A stomach

I’d set mine free

And empty as a cloud, run

In your direction toward the sea

Where salt spray would take the last

Residue of this awful time, turning back horror

Remind me of joy I once took as permanent

Clamboring through live oak, like fairy folk,

Rays of light like stars shine down from sky

Happy dogs, wet with run, tongues lolling, espie March rabbit

The thin stream between content and crestfallen

Just one turn of fate and all you cherished is gone

Reclaiming yourself somehow, among the fallen

How can you expect to thrive when pain halts every nuance?

A burden you do not know how to lift, for it

Wakes you every dawn with insisted sickening

And if you could, you’d disguard the parts that betray you

Run into the heartlands with nothing more than release

And the long legged stride of a creature unwilling

To be shared

For you are a child of this world and no harm is meant

To slow your step, as you cleave toward pilgrimage

One flat foot in front of the other

Setting prints in ochre mud for generations

Where they will ask, how did she keep trying?

Despite the steapness of the trail

And the lapse into despair, how did she

Keep her compass set?

If you said today

Run away

I’d reply

I’m too old of heart for taking chances

And yet …

One foot follows freedom even as the other

Chaffs against chain

It is in my nature, to seek the wild

Among nature, reclaim, loss of liberty

Trying to pin me to insect board

Dry up my dreams, pack away the urge

You haven’t claimed all of me

As long as a part stays

Fixed on open door

I will in time defeat this shackle

Turning into a bird

Threading my flight far

From your waning power.

If you said today

Run away

I’d reply

I’m too old of heart for taking chances

And yet

I want the girl who was just there a moment ago

Who stood on tip-toes and wore clothes twenty years too young

Who didn’t brush the back of her hair and ate with her mouth lolling

If it were a matter of wishing myself better, I’d sell it all and start over empty handed

Reclaim the lost self, in the strange soup of sickness that makes enemies of us

I want to wake up and be, a girl of air and sea and breath

I want to feel whole and no longer racked by hurt

Go forward in time and reclaim what is lost

make me well again, said the child, in the girl, in the woman.