Dawn of Time

There was in the sky a light:

artist: Marthalicia Matarrita

purple and red bled out into blacks like

A mouth just parting, eyes closed, one waited

With baited

Breath

to see what emerged: a pain, a pleasure, a plead, a protest.

And the words were like wind that tears at old weeds and carries them home,

Leaving the world agape for the next life arriving on the wind just behind her.

To take possession, to manifest that which waits:

The winds came and opened the mother,

And the rains came down hard and washed her out in pain and torrent.

And then the seeds could fall, like stars finding home in their way

Along a path to dark matter.

And this was me, and this was you:

Wind and rain tore at each of us (we are not exempt from nature’s laws),

washing skin away in the storm,

uprooting trees that stood like homes-

though overgrown, overwrought with dead vines that stole the light;

And rocks rolled on rocks and cracked them open on shores,

And they broke like dams against each other,

Just as we earthen things broke open to one another

In the flood.

Crashing currents and noise forever, not in our ears but all around us:

We were carried in the mouth that sings.

And this was me, and this was you:

With our earths all gaping, old things felt dead finally,

Wrenched away in the elements that are neither good nor evil but managing balance.

Be we in the way of change, that we are changed also,

Carried along when the dry earth cannot hold the water, and it rushes off,

To find the path of least resistance, the water way:

Carrying us like children who played too deep – carried by pure immersion, pure wonder –

Recognizing infinity, drawn through will,

Caught in the elements that will remake the entire world, and so – us as well.

And the water carried us and the wind whipped, and, reaching for branches,

We found arms. And the darkness was edible it was so thick.

Eternity fed us like it does light.

And the wind was so fast it took our breath on its way,

And we breathed the vacuum.

And the night was long

And starless and morning wouldn’t come til birth was complete.

And so we are racing through mother in the dark,

And yet, here we are, your fingers laced in mine,

And your hair covering my face from sand, and mine wrapped around your cold shoulders,

And we wake to find that you carried me, I carried you.

Elements in their nonjudgement brought elements to bear, for creation, for creators.

This was waking, from the back of the turtle shell,

And this was breaking, up from the salt depths:

Breaking us to light, to air…

From the earthquake that knew only for new, and brought us along,

Into the new world: our new world.

Now we are but Adam and Eve.

The world is new; we stand back to back,

All around us is the razed earth, soaked here,

Desert there,

But we stand, hands held tight, back to back, to face the world.

We carried each other through the unknown, protected only to be thrown:

We stand now, and face it - standing each other up.

What you believed pulled you down, a weight, a burden to bear,

Drowning you,

Was only gravity: body pulled toward body in a magnetism that is nature’s law.

And our doubled weight carried us but faster, harder toward the light,

A momentum otherwise impossible tore away the old growth that sewed

You to a stagnant shore.

And when you woke, your eyes fell on me.

Morning came.

You were not drowned, you were born.

I went with you.
We are our water way. --

artist: Marthalicia Matarrita.
see her work now at Camaradas el barrio: 1st @115th