Lighting my Shadow
Location
My mother earth gave me my shadow.
Her heart relished
in thieving light out of my body
the way that dusk takes wrinkled hands
and a sewing needle to stitch
the sun into the seam of the horizon.
My light sunk into her center but left
subordinate skin to freckle from the ways of the wind.
In fluorescent power she was known
by all who lived in the gaze
of her fire pitted abdomen but
exposed by a shadow who knew no way to win.
Darkness spun ribbons of
ice to burn away her fire
so she slipped her body
under the veil of a velvet curtain
in hope that it would seal my stolen light beneath it.
Time was not to move backward, but only forward
and so she shivered in my shadow before the rise of the sun.
The stars shifted light like promises
and the distance of their glow
mocked my mother earth.
She drew a glass sphere
from the midst of her palm and demanded what
little light was left
in the wake of my shadow so as to
hide it beneath the velvet curtain for her own.
And so I did to my mother earth
what spring does to summer.
As she whirled a rhythm of her own design
the pulsation of water spat down her body
bunched in braided heat and let her drown.
I tore her curtain and ripped her off the stage
so everyone could see the games she played.
And in the flood my mother sunk
into her earth to light her fire in its core,
fueled only by heart to heat that world under
the obliteration of a velvet curtain.
The sky was no longer black
but swam in navy waters, so deep as to
remind me that my shadow was permeant in its way.
The mask of darkness dusted over my face,
the only light a reminder that it was never
enough to be my own.
I wove the bleeding branches of
the broken forest into
my own black city
where the curtain finally did not take my light
but cradled me in its earth
to let the glow of my mother
illuminate the footprints of the
masked shadow I finally called home.