The shell cage inside me
swings with a haunted bird,
eyes wide
mid-molting that never completes.
The cage door is open,
but what use is flying
when the sky is broken.
Can you hear the
humiliation, grief, and shame
in her song?
Job and God say,
beware your “friends.”
They pretend to be with you
but just want to fix you
when they should
break their own harps, their harmonicas,
smash their own guitars,
and just let her sing.
Today I write poems.
The hard ones.
The worst and best to write.
Regret at how I hurt you
as you were so little
while my fears were so big
and so looming.
I am sorry.
I am fool enough to think
these words may be enough.
Looking out the window
at the fog that got us both,
I know this is how you, feel, too—
lost, unseeing.
I don’t know when you will understand
and shake off your winter coat
and run, orange fur escaping into the sun
and meadows I kept you from.
Go now, I pray.
Your bruisings I will hold in my heart, I hope,
if allowed,
so you may be free
from this tumbleweed field
where I birthed you,
where my eyelashes are becoming weighted down
by dust.
Go, go, and remember the best of us.
Swallowed up
in the belly of my bones,
a shy sweetheart, guarded.
Swallowed up
in the belly of my heart,
a promised ark, departed.
Swallowed up
in the belly of the storm,
where it started.
Swallowed up
in the belly of a hawk,
hope, disregarded.
Swallowed up
in the belly of a crow,
the dream, a shell, discarded.