If there were a river it would run straight through your bones

Calcifying you to ash

This branding, is the moon’s doing

She split you at birth, you sing two songs

Stir yourself then … before this dissolve reinforces despair

In time we shall join you, there in your undoing, where you began

and ended, with eyes becoming slowly, a wound

For a short time, you played in the warm current of childhood

I could see your fat fingers pick at the mustard seed in wonder

Your lips pressed in thought, lightness still in your shoulder blades

As fast the rain came, you stayed beneath the tree, until it too, was gone

Uprooted in steady fall, caught in slow-motion by incessant down-pour

And the sour aftertaste of life, struck you cold

Where seeds could not find light, and pain coarsed through your body

Where a lover should have lain, you found only disappointment and pain

You, the brightness at dawn, you with your hair let down and those eyes

I would save you from yourself, if it were possible to divorce mind from soul

That aching blue, reaching across like a violin, rendering its melancholy

Nothing is ever the same

You are changed

Now your photos are sorrowful, though you remain beautiful

Now your throat is filled with unsaid claims against fate

The butterflies still fill your garden and you do not watch them

For you are sleeping in life, the curse and the dammed upon your neck

I think of how you were once, a fire in water, reflecting on falling leaves

Bringing new seasons early, and shooing fear from her hiding place

These bruised eyes look through me now

As the scars on your belly lay white and limp

As your school friends go about their lives without you

You who are left

Among the orange grove and the filtered sun

To wander your loveliness alone

In the shadows of the mosaic, become

Your home.

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