Your bones are under my skin
Your bones are under my skin,
Poking, shoving and pushing
To be heard?
To be seen?
To be loved?
Your bones
Embellished with stories belonging to time before time
In celestial languages carved from the first stirring of stars
Their voices compete for attention
Strident and petal soft
Rebellious but compassionate
Often a screaming dirge
Sometimes a drop of shimmering beauty
Their songs undo my harmonies
Fracturing the fragile equilibrium of my accommodating flesh
Your bones bend and warp in rhythm with your expansive heart
Their marrow bleeding poems for freedom
And amid the combat of our creaking cracking bones
Fighting for survival
We become a slave ship, adrift in oceans uncharted
Your bones sport images of delicate incandescence
Battling with memories of anguish
And freedom fighters,
Arms flung in abandon, graceful
Defining subtle negative spaces
Embroidered with sacred symbols, the
Universal language of first peoples
Bead-river tributaries flowing
Beneath undulating metallic brains
Chained at times
Provoking reverence for the soil
That has embraced our bones for an eternity
With shelter and protection
Your bones demand
Vision
And I am no longer sure that I can still see
Beyond the lacerated flesh of our intertwining
Your bones make me restless
In their search for love and freedom
Tearing, searing my flesh in the process
Every sinew stretched
Nerve ends unveiled, raw
Dying for resolution
I loved my best
Holding our bones in lullabies of tenderness
But will never know if it was enough
I do know you tell a story that your people
Have been waiting for
It has been an ache in their bones
For centuries now
And can no longer be quieted