Let Me Be Born

Let me be born

morning-light against

this starless settling;

unbind me from barren

carriages;  set me down

barefoot on grass

at dawn when the dew

passes anew over

each bowed head,

where red butterflies surge

in and out about

the flowered mound,

unbound and dancing

free, far beyond

the tattered chrysalis.

Listen to this!—the song

of never-having-born-

weight-wings promises

fair scenes impossible

to see from where

I long have stood statue

in old weathered boots

nailed through the soles

to the cold ground

at the brow of the hill

where the wolf and the moon

hold the night like

a knife to a throat, like

an airless tomb, like

a spoon in a spoon in a spoon.

This poem is a revision of a poem posted some months ago.  I recently found the first draft of this poem and was drawn to it, over and above the revised poem I posted.  I had the privilege of giving a short homily at the beginning of the Good Friday Stations of the Cross last week at Christ the King Church in Pleasant Hill, and in my talk I explored  ways Jesus invites us "to come and die" with Him.  One of the ways we are invited to die is to name and cast off our various false selves -- false identities that we, over time, have adopted to cope with our various fears, shames, and angers.  I ended up reading a version of this poem as the ending to the homily.  The version I am posting here has further edits still. This might be one of those poems that never gets finished--which would be quite congruent with its subject matter, seeing how elusive it is to uncover and reject all of our various, subtle, and hard-to-part-with false-self layers.

Photo by Robert K. Hall.  https://www.smoothphoto.com.