SPEAK TO ME IN POETRY
Speak to me in poetry, oh tired body—
When love around me fades & words no longer hold honesty— speak to me in poetry.
If my breaking is told in verse, clothed in beauty, maybe one day I can behold pain like a painting on a museum wall. Appreciating the suffering that creates beauty in ways only suffering can. So please, please—
Won’t you speak to me in poetry?
Like a lighthouse or a siren, pull me out of the abyss I have been searching— back into the safe harbor that is my own Breath. Speak to me in poetry, oh breaking heart— like the familiar sound of a home’s front door— speak to me in poetry.
With ancient sounds of belonging reverberating in my broken chest: speak to me in poetry. Translate the pangs of my ache into psalms that may one day turn into a song I hum for when the future I imagined crumbles and silences my story.
When everything has lost its glimmer & lungs no longer inflate with the sweet lost breath of another— speak to me in poetry. Let your words of remembrance hold me, oh tried soul, when the warmth of my lover departs, until my entire being is draped in the words of your poetry.
Speak to me in poetry, oh enduring Mother Earth. Show me that you only rip out the roots that bind. In your necessary pruning, let the sun pour into my shoveled out soul. Let poetry fall like nectar until my parched soil drinks its honey.
Until my very name is pronounced in poetry.
Until the gaps between these cracking ribs and torn muscles are weaved back together with a deep remembrance that
I am my own home
And I am my own poem.