Once butter-fat and milky, marrow
gelling into brittle feather bone,
quill, gladius— What the year
seems to have done to all softness
inside me. You too? And the scrolls
of beautiful wood carved with signs
we treasured as talismans: they’ve
been hacked into a hundred pieces.
Hide one under your tongue, take
another and burn to ash then drink
as if a potion. Bury a few in the hearts
of seeds you’ll plant in earth, in water.
Let the rest go with the stars. Crickets
in the fire will feed our hunger. Before we
take them into our bellies, we thank them.
We thank every little thing that enters
us like a word, a sword, a sound— the way
a newborn’s cry cuts through a fog of blankness.
In response to Via Negativa: Radical.