Patricia L. Meek
Still
I.
In the tattered month
of the Maypole splinter,
I sat uptight
in my upright chair.
Embers roaring in the fire.
Manifesto, a bound volume
on my knees.
The
Triumph typewriter, all
day, had hammered
the orders out.
Führer, framed
behind my head,
cast a long
shadow
across the dead.
By the winter of ’48, I was
black boots defeated power,
tapping in ashen crumble
of Italian marble.
Supernova, locked and loaded, I pressed
9mm Luger against my soft palate.
Führer framed behind my head.
III.
During the incarnation
of my resentment,
my palms itched,
searching for something
to steal. I knew not
the stillness
of night, a treasure to hold.
I cursed my sullen lot,
not owning, but taking
justly desserts
to feed my opium pipe.
Into shadowy dens,
I held onto nothing,
not even my life.
V.
When I was an infantryman, I vowed nothing like
this would ever happen
to my women,
to my children.
I followed SOP and
All Feasible Precautions
as I pressed the button, leveling a market and a school into rubble.
There was nothing left in the scattered debris that
was recognizable as a living thing. Not even me.
II.
In those lost summers
of my brief life,
voices filled my village
with tribal songs. Thousands
of generations lived in my blood.
I had amazing arms, ochre, black currant,
red, like our mother, and strong.
Baby hammocked
to my back, I hacked
sheaves into meal.
Bread to feed our people.
An hour after sunset,
on the day of the coup,
I, along with five hundred others,
were rounded up in the back
of cargo trucks.
My tongue was severed.
Then they cut away my hands.
A million others were macheted
in their shoes.
IV.
In that life,
I was born
sorceress; I invoked prayers
with drums and rattles.
Heat and herb conjured the invisible
Universe in every living thing.
Rocks were sisters, Bear, my brother.
Earth, my mother. Until
Crusaders’ red crosses, draped across thundering
chain-mailed horses torched the thatch in which
we lived. They feared
the tongues in which I sang, so
slashed my throat and speared
baby heads by the dozen.
In courts of righteousness,
persecution’s wood gavels
pounded down our rattles and our drums. Then
they choked our children with the pages of their
history annals.
VI.
In the theatre
of embodiment, I’ve played all roles,
and returned again.
Dissolving
into space,
Now I
take refuge in
the cosmic mirror.
I AM the love
that burns
away the veil,
where the pendulum
stops swinging
and falls
still.