Rear View
Mira Black • December 20, 2018
COLOURED GLASS
Walking past holiday windows
freshly wrapped
in Christmas colours,
each one begging me
to take its treasures home,
I catch a glimpse
of myself
in the glass
and wonder again
who exactly
I think I am.
Have I always been this
and simply fooled myself
with visions of bliss?
Notions of grandeur?
Some glittering idea
that I was becoming
someone?
What is this body
moving through
this strange experience,
always waiting
to gain,
to earn,
to show,
to prove?
I used to care.
Now
I don’t know.
Once,
I had the glow
of hope.
I could leap
toward the unknown
content
with whatever words
the Universe
placed in my throat.
I lived for the scramble
of pulling meaning
from the subtext,
following this manifested voice
as it wandered
through me,
choosing again
and again
to say something true.
I believed someday
I would learn
to walk steady
even when Life raged.
Even when
it hurt.
But here,
in this window,
I see only Me.
No magic.
No Divine current
thrilling through
the difficulty.
No secret language
waiting beneath
the ordinary.
Just this woman
moving through
a vision
marketing trained her
to despise,
waiting to buy
the right thing
to fix
whatever is wrong
so maybe
finally
I can succeed.
Be happy.
Even while
bleeding out.
Where does Love hide
under the blinding lights
of commercially viable
everything?
Don’t get me wrong.
I love a beautiful gift
as much as anyone.
I’m just contemplating
the nature of humanity
while shopping
for my sanity,
wondering
if I have been wrong
all this time,
making rhymes
I can hide inside
in case someone
cares enough
to come looking
for me.
Today
I have forgotten
what it means
to be Soul
Black's Blog
Year 2 Grief journey
Logan Crane Nov 204-899-3921-May30th 2024
Dedicated to Laila Biali
IT’S AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB OF SEVERAL BILLION
Wake up, you slumbering Life. You have grown too familiar with the lie that keeps you fed but never nourished. Too comfortable inside the status quo, that well-decorated room where nothing grows but everyone says, isn’t this enough? Wake up like the first time your lover smiles and something secret begins to unfold between my words and your hidden place. Once I have tasted the sound of your voice between my lips, it is almost as if Life itself might finally kiss me. Make a wish of me. Make a choice. Make a move. Say my name like you mean it and prove me wrong for believing I am unlovable, as if you could. As if Love would ever agree to become a witness against me. Still, this mind screams inside the body, pulling thought from thought, knot from knot, trying to solve the ache with another plan. Caught in the old mistake: confusing the chase for happiness with the courage to be alive. Empty hands reach for the sky, but the sky does not explain itself. Morning comes. Your eyes doubt. Your body knows. And there it is, the bloody contrast between who you are, what you want, and the life you keep pretending is close enough. At least your feet still tell the truth. One step. Then the staggering next. This is how waking comes. Not as a choir. Not as lightning. Not as someone finally choosing you. But as the unbearable mercy of seeing clearly what you can no longer betray. The pulse runs wild. The teeth rattle. The skin rises. The muscles strain against all the silence you trained them to carry. Hold on to the procession that pulled you from the soft grave of almost enough. Do not mistake the dream for freedom. Do not mistake the familiar for home. Do not mistake being wanted for being known. Listen. The song in your head hurts because it is true. And all you know for certain is this: you have not been honest in far too long. So wake up, you slumbering Life. Wake up before the lie learns your voice and starts calling itself Love. ~ MIRA
I spent years trying to outrun the darkness. As though healing were a race. Then one ordinary morning I noticed my attention. How it kept returning to the same abandoned house. The same hand unwound from mine. Naked intimacies with fire, ignoring the burn. As though love were something I had to earn. The same cup where your lips last touched it. The same wound begging to become my only religion. No one told me then I was never responsible for the darkness laid upon me. Only for the quiet miracle as my attention remembers to love me as I am. Not to force. Not to run. Just... stay. The kind that sits beside the dark without becoming it. The kind that remembers there is more sky than storm. The kind that notices a bird improvising her song even while the heart is still breaking. Perhaps awakening is nothing more mysterious than this. Love looking so gently at suffering until suffering forgets to follow me home. ~MIRA
Dedicated to a beautiful Soul walking beside me from across the veil.
Do not call me unattached because I have learned not to beg at every closing door. This heart has not become clean. It has become weathered. There are names I no longer say out loud that still change the temperature of my body. There are hands I have released that still arrive in dreams as if the soul keeps its own appointment book. I know how to pray without building a prison around the Beloved. I know how to open and still let the river move on. This did not come from holiness. It came from loss. From repetition. From standing in the aftermath with my nervous system on fire like a city skyline bright with lightning I have mistaken longing for prophecy. I have called absence care. I have watched my body reach for what my spirit had already surrendered. So no, I am not untouched. I am touched everywhere. By grief. By beauty. By the unbearable intimacy of being human with no guarantee that love will stay where I place it. Still, I refuse the immaculate heart. Let me be marked. Let tenderness leave evidence. Let love ruin the small false self that thought safety meant never opening again. At three in the morning when memory walks through me wearing someone else’s voice, I do not call it weakness. I call it proof. Something entered. Something mattered. Something sacred found a door in me and left it open. ~MIRA #brave #canadian #poet
#griefjourney
Do you ever hear God? I mean truly hear the voice of silence louder than the ruckus across the street. Like thunder Like proof Like God is simply sitting next to you? Do you ever hear God whispering more loudly than the storm? Sometimes the depth of love inside your own heart shining, breaking opening, folding, smashing, like a lake against the rocks under the full moon torrents days before the rain? Do you ever hear God say your name? Not the one you were born with, nor the one your parents claimed. The other one. The secret one. The name only your Soul remembers when the world stops. Please tell me when you notice magic rising suddenly to kiss you for no reason except that you are here. I used to hear God. I used to feel warmth gather around me like I was the most cherished daughter, swimming in clear water, certain of the song singing to the wind. I used to know the words by heart. When magpies landed at my door, I knew they were for me. A certain melody mystical messengers made for me from my Beloved. I knew the veil was thin enough to let the dead kiss me sometimes. I knew the world was speaking in riddles and rhymes I could understand. Some call darkness failure demanding light when I am also mud, blood, hunger, river, ash, and a new moon sky. I have listened too long to people who fight over God as if God is a house only they can afford. And when I ask them about God, they laugh like I have said something only children do. When I ask them about God, they turn away afraid of demons, while I burst into a million pieces of light, realizing I’d been listening to God all along. ~ MIRA