simonhlilly

WARRIOR PRAYER

Oh Moon-Face. Your unguent drips from my fingertips.

Shades of dead universes flit across the dark sky.

We long for this as much as we long for otherness.

Moon-Face, we construct the spells that feed you,

So sleek and willow-limbed.

This is how we made you:

A womb to hold all the weeping dead.

Born again as owls, as worms, as dreams in blooming girls.

In flowers pushed up through sacred, spiced earth.

Poured out with the salmon spawn and the eggs of serpents.

Split open and oozed in the nests of eagles,

Drying in the daylight, voiceless and crying.

The taste I remember – iron and oceans,

And the slip slop of long tides

And the waking shape of salt.

The taste of footprints and warm belly

And secret clefts and caves of echoes.

The taste I remember of the sharp bright edge,

Honed bright and sunlight, severed

By its arcing swing.

Oh Moon-Face. You eat the seconds so.

You eat the minutes and the moments.

Bound, wired and woven to the haft of sound.

The blade that cuts through space.

The light so soft, it can eat life and death

And never be fuller than it is, than it is.

Moon-Face. Keep your promise

And we shall die again, happy.

We will not forget your sweet hunger.

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