Still and Gently Listening

 Flowering woman         Lucy Pierce © 2013

Still and gently listening deeply within

to the tender turning of the tide,

the fine filaments swaying in the release

of an anciently withheld current,

announcing ripples of exquisitely infinitesimal

and unforetold change

through the landscape of the feeling field.

Condensing into clusters of exquisite agony,

grand crescendos of unlovedness within,

building only to find the place that yields,

bursting banks of the long held stories of separation,

surrendering the pain of who I thought I was

for something else,

equally unknowable and tenderly awkward,

and becoming the path to another forbearance

and yet another pooling of dark matter within.

Still, and darkly listening,

following the thread that is leading me home.

The brittle disintegration of paper-like encasements

deep in the body,

breaking through that which held energies separate,

that fragile membrane enough to withhold

the pulsing tides of life until now.

I dream of empty, untended rooms of my psyche,

newly discovered, dusty and barren

from a lifetime’s disinhabitance.

Thunderous, trembling transmutation,

blasting through the whimpering fear,

the trembling earthquake transfiguring

the landscape in its wake.

Staying awake in that which is numb

until that small constellation opens

and shaking off the drowsy unfeelingness,

aligns with that which is fully felt.

Feeling through the sheathes of that which I have denied,

shrouding my within,

like a mantle of protection that no longer serves.

I am re-mantling the body,

bringing myself home to the alter

of my own cellular inheritance,

restoring it’s abandoned places

it’s misused and neglected sanctuaries.

I am coming home,

hungry for wholeness and the task eternal.

Infinitely nuanced this seeking to reinstill

the nerve beneath the wound.

And yet the question sings,

rising like an air bubble through the deep and cloying mud,

displaced by my footstep on the riverbed of my being,

How can I come to lay my burden down?

My bones and muscles aching under the load of my darkness,

how can I unhitch the boulder that I wear

always on my shoulder, and be free?

And so I do as I have always done,

seek the space beneath,

tend the place between,

open on the inside,

as wide and as infinitely small as can be,

still, and gently listening,

least the answer to my question

be whispered softly in the night.

The tentative exploring of that space

where grace might dwell within me,

where God might sing within me.

Each hungry cell awake with the hunger

to be remembereded by love,

skin alert like a new-born babe,

or a body embalmed.

Lucy Pierce © 2013