Shaped by Unseen Histories

I am forged in the fire of my own forgetting 

as much as I am hewn from the tome of my recollection.

Forged by the great amnesia of my shadow's blind deductions, 

the things that were too hard to grasp, too exiled to love, too painful to embody, 

by the other side of the coin of love, the face of my fear. 

I am born of my ancestor's suffering as much as from their joy, 

I am dismantling beliefs that have twisted and crippled at the root, 

retrieving what was abandoned so long before my birth, 

restoring oxygen to severed limbs and disembodied narratives, 

extracting power from pain, reweaving love from shame, 

recalibrating warmth from the numb scarification of millennia of suffering. 

Too much has passed before me that could not be held to the light, 

that fled to corners where the shadows eased the edges of agony, 

where brutality was softened by the darkness and retreat from the predatory gaze. 

I am scouring the cosmos for the dark matter of my undoing, 

purifying pain with the wrestled out light of my dim remembering, 

adding minuscule brushstrokes of a half recalled love 

to the tapestry of my forgetting and misguided assumption, 

that because I am made of pain and shadow I am anything less than a miracle. 

I am breathing love home to an ostracized defense 

against the perfection of my own place in creation.

I am made of smoke and mirrors, 

ancient forces shrouded in benign preconceptions.

I am a rampant wilderness tamed to an impotent forgetting.

I am hunger and blindness.

I am remembering.

I am shaped by my own unlivedness, the timbre of that from which I am withheld,

as much as from the neural pathways of the known.

I am molded by my own judgement and fear, 

carved from my hunger and blindness, 

perimetered by my incapacity to perceive vastness, 

prohibited by my misunderstanding of time and eternity. 

I am squeezed through the eye of a needle, 

crushed beneath the anvil of my own craving to be made small and unseen, 

to stay safe and oblivious and inconsequential....

And yet this vast ancient belonging reduced to a solitary yearning 

to know myself for what I most truly am, 

and have most magnificently forgotten how to be. 

I am shrouded in beliefs forged in the mind of a child 

who would have done anything to subvert the suffering she could not understand, 

I am unpicking the clumsy stitches of the false garments of my presumptions

with the blunt tools of my hope and my faith,

that it could possibly be made to fit a little more comfortably 

with a more expansive identity than the infantile beliefs 

of a ravenous pain-body, passed down through the ages,

adorned with the beads and buttons of eons of ancestral trauma 

transmuting through the vulnerable and visceral flesh and blood beneath. 

I hunger to awaken to what I was before the pain and forgetting, 

before the mind manipulated matter to be perceived by the smallness of our servitude to brutality, through the lens of our avoidance of pain,

rather than the orchestral resonance of a cosmic belonging 

to the threads of eternal remembering that all life is seeded in love 

and all life to love returns.


Photo taken by the beautiful Angela Rivas of Lunasol Photography for the book From This Place.
Text © Lucy Pierce 2017