Lumine
Our salvation
is a gold ring surrounding the eye
of a blackbird
and those red-winged birds
returned from war
wearing bloody feathers.
The women are grieving.
They dream cities
that are nothing in one moment.
Clouds opening like flowers.
They dream silence that doesn’t break.
They light fat candles their hands molded
in the hopeful shape of children
who are thin.
In the night
a woman hears the blackbird on her roof.
Her dark neck,
her pale neck
her soft neck where the pulse moves
is mourning.
Hysteria, the doctors say of this pain,
from the womb.
And it is.
She watches while children disappear
in their own eyes.
That quickly you are not alive
and it is nothing
and she knows it.
Lumine.
Light pulls from the candles at the altar
you can pass a hand through
and pull back the wind
that blows through bodies
dancing the edges out of the earth.
Out of the earth
out in the wind
in the dancing rain and sun,
destroyed horses lose their light around them,
an aura of bleached fur
around the bones.
for Sister Rosalie Bertell, MD