I was cast aside, like garden waste, when I knew it was real. Into the mound of the forgotten, the used and useless. But, all these years were not wasted. I was learning how to fertilize, utilize disintegration, deterioration towards resurrection, towards new life.
I was unworthy, once. But I heard her singing inside me and around me all the while. Her pressing me towards transformation. And she was beautiful. How could I, forgotten, dripping with mud and grime, mold and moss be any different? All along she was singing and she was many and she was one. And she sang the blues so well, because she had been death. She knew suffering like she knew her own breath. She sang it long before he came, long, long ago. Once revered, she was turned up in the compost, criminalized and crushed.
But all the birds are singing now, and all the birds are beautiful, they are washing it all into the sea. And it is beautiful. I’m listening. I’m listening to find what shape becomes me when I turn myself over to see. And I weep with hope. Nothing can silence her.
What a relief to know it is not my love – it is love itself – and that she will come again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again…no matter where I am in the end, what shape I am. Only some are exhausted by her relentless returning. Because they think her voice is more beautiful at the edge of a blade.
But there is much to save now, and nothing to sacrifice. I put all life at your feet and say to you death is gone my friends, for you and for me in the rejoicing.
*Note: Please don’t be deceived by the use of “she” here. The pronoun is important to me, but how we see this kind of force of transformation does not rely on a pronoun and does not exclude he or they or any of the others.