You are the little seed
who only bursts
in fire or flood,
harbinger of wonder,
something from the other world,
who sits in darkness waiting,
inside a burial chamber
or a birth canal,
aching body soothed
by a constellation’s kiss
across winter’s cheek,
where early morning
owl songs
bridge
here
and there.

You are the patron saint
of moth-eaten love letters
read in blue light,
the earth fallen innocence
of wing pierced skin
and whistling winds who say:
The beginning can be hard,
because nothing stays the same,
but don’t stop now.

You are the tiny star
who only dreams
of the explosion,
breaking open ceremoniously
into the light of nothingness,
where it is not enough
to simply trust,
but to surrender so fully
you become,
proclaiming your presence
in the landslide
of shedding skin,
carving a path of courage
through fragments of mirror
dropped from the sky,
shattered by the sounds of angels,
reflecting your unfamiliar face
on the ocean floor.

You are the sweet one
with razor teeth
who gnashes on truth,
leaving to find beauty
in an alien landscape,
returning to the calling
that you will listen to now,
because you have to,
collecting every tangled thread
beneath your loom,
like seaweed on the shore
of a place that feels like home,
though you have only ever lived
out at sea,
beaten smooth by tides
who speak in concentric circles
of memory, visions
and voices
lost to wolves and moonbeams.

Then, a spindle-pricked finger
and a drop of blood,
watering your white dress
in a garden of roses set alight,
petals singed and singing:
Keep going little one.
Don’t fall asleep again.
See through the eyes
of the ancients
how they learned to live
all those years,
alive in the tenderness of being,
how being born
was the first radical act,
and how letting go is the next.

They breathe through you,
and you can see them
in the lines around your eyes
when you laugh secrets,
or when you open
your mouth to cry.
Clocks tick inside trees,
dying in parched soil,
beneath which lies life,
dormant,
ready to sprout something loud,
unknown.

Your resilience is resounding.
Remember.

The clockmaker
and the starweaver
sit together
at the sacred hearth,
comforted by a strange stillness
that turns the golden key,
opening,
awakening,
breaking some spell,
and the thousand year rain
begins.
Grow.
Now.

Inspired by the magical land of Joshua Tree, California