The sea and the coal

Sound hot and cool, black and blue…  

 

Boo – are you afraid?

How old is your skin, how young is your pain?

 

“Your innocence can’t last.”

Stare the “unabashed stare” of the past.

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Coals burn, seas surge, 

And in their noise and wind, your silence dawns.

 

You breathe the first and last light for each day –

The rebirth and the death collected.  

 

You are hardened, rough, and relentless.

I am soft, supple, and scared.

 

You stand like a shepherd over your flock of black-and-brittle-boned sheep, which

neither flees

nor follows.

They do not belong to you, just as you do not belong.

 

You lead the line between the sea and the sky –

If you led me, I can’t say that I would follow.

 

How to run, when there is nowhere to go?

There is no where, no when, but the sequential now.

 

 

I have none of your surety, your stoicism.

You stay, you watch – saintlike, but beyond your own mercy.

 

To see the whites of my eyes reflected with yours,

In the faces of the black, brittle coals,

 

The coarseness and expanse of your hard, limp hand

Heaves, is heavy, while holds only Nature to your heart.

 

We are a wilderness, of the wild, bewildered.

I hold fear, and you hold me.