Mending
In the end, everything works up to mending,
The boat stitched to a split of ocean finally arriving,
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On a shore neither fire nor a spread of sorrow.
The sky blended into its water shadow, we admire
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The quality of light as it anoints our shoulders,
Our self-chosen names surfacing to our throats.
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Shattered, smoldering, unhusked, fully exhausted,
Our lives surprise us, how they managed to inflict
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A skeleton of order in the world, the great undoing.
Oh, how we want to laugh, with tears in our eyes!
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How we want to throw the pages of history,
Gather them again with respect to ther new form.
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How we want the hours to ebb and shudder, determine
And rinse their own landscapes, undo the weave
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Of memory, and not persist in hard dissembling that
Had become familiar, as we took one heavy drag
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Of air after another. Having lost the desire to breathe,
We come to a clear taste of the long-delayed eternal.
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My tongue versed with ten thousand languages,
I repeat your each and every word, the syllables intact.
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We hurt only as a matter of whimsy.
In our current state, love and hate interlock
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Into a single, unbreakable ring. Our bodies,
Their imperfections and injuries healed, have urged
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Our souls from the depths, now hovering
On our shoulders like wings. We have not aspired
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To be good, and yet look at us, unwhitholding.
Your heart, sea-tossed and battered among the living.
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Is now as miraculous as mine, self-sufficient,
Suffused with light. We are sustained through God’s
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Shining umbilical cord. This is the true democracy,
The civilization of long-lost companions.
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Written by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
