The swallowtail paid a visit this morning, a flutter of striped wings, tipped itself in hello as we sipped coffee and looked up from our morning paper.
We smiled at the swallowtail then each other. You swear it is the transformed caterpillar we rescued from certain death as it hung from the dog’s lip and then tenderly placed in safety on the gourd vine leaves growing by the wood pile.
I do not know. It could very well be. It is beautiful in its flight. Its morning joyful greeting of belonging, of having found its place.
It has begun. They will come for us tonight. Darkness their friend. The cloak of night hides their evil, so they believe. We know they will place us in one of the camps. We are of no use to them. Old dissenters of questionable things, the light which frightens them. We fought long and hard, each in her own way.
Now, it is time for you, all my daughters, to stop. Your survival is the only way we win. Survive. Do not give up. Fight now by surviving. If you do not survive, there is no hope for a future.
I beseech you all to remember: Use only the last name I paid to have bleached for you. Pretend to forget your heritage now, for if pride lets you not pretend, you will not survive, and your heritage dies with you. Wear the gold cross on the gold chain as proof you believe as they do. Learn and recite their prayers, for God does not care. Cover your skin in the sun, it cannot turn too dark. Pass for them if you at all can. If you cannot, lower your eyes and hide defiance within the coverage of pretend obedience. Bite your tongue silent so you may make your way forward. Though I cannot travel with you (I will not live long enough to see the return), above all, remember all roads lead to Delaware.
Yet, I will be there with you when you arrive and breathe in freedom.
Hidden behind two different sized levels, I saw it.
And the ache of my bones reared up — electric, sharp edged-- I shrank in the ugly face of its brutality.
Yes, I admit— I shrank down 50 years or so more or less— a thirteen-year-old, helpless, swimming in a stuttering stupor, nose barely above water, in the wake of this awakened ache in my bones-- the sight of a metal yardstick like the one my drunken mother tried to break over my back as she had her wooden one.
And I, after all these years, I still carry that ache, hidden, in the marrow of my bones
Sitting here in New Mexico and looking at these mountains, I wonder if my mother ever heard the mountains of Appalachia sing as I do these.
The mountains sing their history-- of when they knew only tranquility in the land of their ancient salt seas, when the sun could not touch them, when they were virgin still-- safe from the rough hands of the wind, long before the rise of humanity.
Their song holds the rhythms, the bars, the layers of the time before-- before an angry molten core, containing not a single drop of mercy, drove them from their ancient, peaceful home, forcing them to be refugees in the kingdom of sun and wind.
Their song holds the rhythms of all they grieve in witnessing humanity’s rise, dripping in eternal inhumanity.
At the feet of the mountains, the lilacs, nourished by snow melt tears, bow their heads and dance in the rhythms of the mountains’ song— A dance of homage to such ancient ones.
Forgive me, I ramble, telling you of life at sea level--
where a steady pour of hours stream, and minutes bead against the windowpanes as the seconds mist into fog-- decades of earth and rock liquify-- A mottled mix of flowing colors and viscosities defiant and devoid of any beauty to ease a slippery sharp-edged flow carving out an emptiness within this near ghost of a soul waiting in unacknowledged darkness, while asking for a way to the light—
before waking in the softness of morning at altitude.
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