By: Camryn Hartigan
We are criminals.
We set futures ablaze with embers of yesterdays,
We stuff black smoke down the throat of her, silently watch her choke on her own ashes.
We do it all, and we clutch our children, the heirs to her suffering, babble weightless apologies and promises built on
soft ground.
But the battered mother still loves.
The sunlight still wakes to plant soft kisses upon us each morning,
the night’s soft sighs still lure us towards dreaming each night.
The moon still calls for shimmering tides to pull laughter from our chests,
the bumblebees of our gardens still breathe life into our crops, even with poison dusted on their delicate wings.
Ancient arms still reach to the sky and wrap their breath around our
cold, fearful shoulders.
Unfathomable, it seems, to embrace after slaughter.
To hold blood-covered hands.
Merciful, our mother is,
Despite our crimes.
We cut her children to their knees and set ablaze their hair,
Yet she forgives.
Because we are not criminals alone, but too, her bloom.
Alongside the trees and the raptors, the tallgrasses and the tides.
The silent land we stand upon is devotion, and we are her greatest hope,
for all that she is, we are.
With the rains, we will cleanse ourselves of the past we cling to in paralysis.
With the winds, we will extinguish the flames we set upon us.
And before the seas, we will rise.
