Blessing the Bones - Cynthia Poten

[Larry Robinson]

Blessing the Bones
 
Mist curls through bushes and trees,
veils a woman on her knees to a river
that carries her words to the sea.
Eyes flashing like a wild dark night,
she speaks with the majesty of a Goddess,
 the ardor of a Priestess, the urgency of a Mother.
 
The words float downstream and enter the Pacific
where they seep into white caps and shimmering cobalt.
Sunlight quickens every syllable sent to bless
the bones of Earth made bare by human malice,
the bones of Being born to skin and fur
 to leaf and feather, root and scale, hoof and claw.
 
As the blessing weaves through equatorial islands,
bones beckon like shadows in bright cascades of foliage.
Driftwood beckons from gleaming shores -- tree bones
soothed by rhythms of the tides
>From Hiroshima and Nagasaki come whispers like flames,
as if vaporized bones are a ghost fire,
a haunting that will ever abide as the ultimate abuse
of humanity’s power to create.
 
Across the Eurasian landmass they beckon --
the bones of homicide, genocide, ecocide
the bones of scattered mountain tops
of butterflies ground into grasslands
of wetlands dried and commodified.
 
>From the Atlantic, bones beckon in beats of relief
at being tossed from slave ships.
In the Americas, they beckon from vanished villages,
from dusty drawers sequestered in museums,
from plantations, prairies, mines, and oil fields,
from once primal forests and ancient ceremonial grounds.
 
On days of the full moon, the woman returns
to the river that carried her blessing.
Black hair drapes her shoulders like a mantle of Creation
Her eyes shine with the tears of a planet
and the light of a star.
Some days she hears bells and a soft drum
It’s then the birds come.
                                                               
	- Cynthia Poten