SOMETHING SACRED

I’ll lower with the sun, a mile beyond the place I rest

Left just past the tallest pine, right before the weaver’s nest

Straight across the open field, where fawns below me race

as I fly toward the setting sun, to Kala’s favorite place

Should I, however briefly, lose my focus as I soar,

should I feel the warmth of freedom’s fires burning in my core,

the river, as a mirror, might alert me with its glare

to the fiery fallen leaves, entwined with copper ropes of hair

Descending toward the Earth, I’ll find a quiet place to land

being careful not to wake the Wolf who sleeps beneath her hand

I’ll rummage through the leaves to find the strongest fallen thorn

to carve a line in Kala’s rock, mark another night to mourn

Eighty sunsets will have called me down to mark his grave

Eighty lines I will have carved for eighty passing days

Though every ritual has been as painful as the first,

Tomorrow, eighty lines will mark the day of Kala’s birth

The stars above me say her heart will mend itself in time,

that even now it’s healing as she sleeps beneath the pine

A mile away I see the lights escaping with her breath

Coiled on the ground, a helpless babe to Mother’s breast

There can be nothing sacred when the heart is in such pain,

no ritual to calm a storm too powerful to tame

Such lies her grief has told her in the cold and lonely night

that she tries to quench her growing thirst by feasting on the light

Every evening as she’s falling with the setting sun

I gather up the parts of her the lights were meant to numb

Harvesting the colors of her deepest, darkest pain

And from these broken fragments made a thousand brilliant stains

Perhaps another hundred suns will set before she sees

that just a mile away her heart is painted in the trees

The colors of her soul I pray inspire her to sing

The deepest scars alone can make so beautiful a thing