Maybe what I didn’t know all along this path
was that all my heart’s feeling was nourishment,
like rain water filling the roses.
I thought it was a fire in a tinder dry wood,
a hail of flaming comets at world’s end —
I had to hold onto the rails.
I hand-cuffed myself to them.
And I closed my eyes and ears.
Then Life crushed the chain and tied me to the mast.
And they came…..

The sirens came with fire, with oil, with electricity.
Their laughter was a sword through my heart.
Like smoke in the house they flew past locked doors.

Now, as I walk the abject ruin of the past,
I see, because the sun is up,
it was grace that came in guise of destruction.
Grace that came with weapons and a blazing eye.
Grace that sat beside me and tried to push its sword into my hand.
I’d swallowed my heart and had not the eyes to see.

Grace brought:
Flame that cauterizes the insidious infection of involuted thought,
it purges the contagion;
Oil that dissolves the heavy tar of fear;
Lightning that comes where the heart lay in ash;
And roses begin to pierce that mantel —
an attar of intoxicating fragrance rises.