1.
At the place of She of Whom We Cannot Speak,
near ocean,
she breathes
from rocks and waters,
the great breath
long-lived,
here before the human
breath,
as our eyes take in the red turtles
down below. They swim
in clear blue water,
so blue, so clear,
and the many rays fly beneath them,
all coming up for air. Suddenly
the flying fish leap up
and just as quickly birds fly down to eat them.
So many lives here
breathe at this place of serpent dreaming.
This continent remembers
the membrane
between worlds is so thin
it breathes
and the invisible ones are here
as we cross times, this line
we cross into a new song
breathing
like tides coming and going.
is recalled in all its pain.
Even water remembers,
and as we walk the great serpent island,
this long bone of breathing land,
alive and blue, yellow, often red
as the turtles, the blood.
Remember, it was all laid down
at the very beginning,
the first song,
the breath.
It’s the way they say we were stars
passed through time,
slid between the walls of a universe
to be born as a human child taking
her first breath,
and still, many years later,
breathing.
2.
You know something great and plenty
laid down this world
and waits to rise again
with the right songs or stories told,
the ones about which we cannot speak.
She, the one of whom we cannot speak,
breathes this way, rich and air-filled.
We have heard her
between the stone and sea,
breathing.
At first I thought it was a whale
but it was more.
It doesn’t matter what that first story was.
Anyone would know
the world itself laid down
in this ocean of just one universe
contracting and expanding,
giving birth, and all around us
are nurseries of new stars,
the sea turtles,
the oceanic mystery spoken
before our beginning.
But what I can tell you is that here it rains flowers.
They fall from the trees so richly
filled with birds of many colors.
Who would want more in this life?
Then by night
blue flowers shine in the dark.
I admit there is something to call
magic here,
and such breath
I never thought before.
A world, a mystery
most of which we cannot speak.