Tag: writing

Bell Hooks, Bone Black

I bring my book to her and read aloud. Like Rilke, she tells me not to be afraid to look deeply into everything, not even pain. I can tell her—my friend, who loves me always—that I want to belong, that it hurts to live always on the outside. She tells me there are many ways to belong in this world, and that it is my work to discover where I belong.

At night, when everyone is silent and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write: I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone-black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.

Apostle of the Creek

Tell me—what makes a good apostle?

a god’s breath sighs
over the roof of your house
on a stormed-in night.

i heard god is the one
who pricks you with blackberry thorns
when you are out gathering.
the creek behind your grandfather’s house
runs full.
you are barefoot,
armed with a basket.

you reach, bleed,
eat greedily.
you taste blood and blackberry.
the berries stain your mouth.

i’ve heard god speaks quietly
because he does not want
to startle the deer.
his voice is lush, soft,
folded into the sound of the creek
as you fill your basket.

he is in the red beads
at the tips of your fingers.
when you eat, he slips
down your gullet and lies still,
murmuring at the back of your throat
as if to speak through your mouth—
but shy, shy—

i’ve seen god in the arch of your foot
stretching across a rock.
i’ve seen him in your desperate faith
when you leap
from bank to stone.

he watches you
like a fox hunting a rabbit.
a yearning, childless woman.
an oak straining under a vine.
he tastes your blood with you.

tell me—
how do you worship
without a name?

A Candle for Ambiance

They won’t admit it,
but some people watch the dying
like they’re afraid they might learn something.
As if death might notice them noticing
and turn its face.

Curtains breathe apart.
The flick of a lighter,
a kettle’s shriek,
a phone buzzing with quiet verdicts.

“Ambulance again.”
“He’s outside.”
“Still no movement.”

The grief is tidy at this distance.
Contained.
No blood.
No sound.
No scent.
Only flashing lights

and the shoulder of a woman
who doesn’t wipe her eyes.

Down the street, someone stirs onions.
Steam fogs a window.
Someone lights a candle
and pretends it’s for ambiance,
an apology for not knocking.

We’ve forgotten how to enter mourning
without needing an invitation.
We’ve made grief a spectator sport —
a flickering feed,
a casserole dropped at the door.

But still —
still someone watches,
and someone cooks,
and someone texts,
and someone doesn’t know what to say,
so they say nothing,
and let the pot boil instead.

Because when death comes
and you weren’t the one beside it,
you still want the dying to know —
I saw you.
Even if only
through the window.

At Dusk, Everything Looks Blue

First Darkness

In the eastern sky,
the first star is out.
A single bone, white
and sharp, socketed.

At dusk, everything looks blue.

The world bleeds warmth,
the cool colour of a vein
beneath skin.

Blue,
a bruise that remembers pain.
The horizon swallows its fire,
draws itself inside out,

like a map of your skin,
the only territory that matters.

Call west,
where copper ember drowns.
Call south,
where roots grow dense in soil.
North,
where tightening cold locks earth in silence.
East.

Call light back into your eyes
before this star is joined by its legion,
an ossuary of ancient fire,
a cold promise
marker of what is gone.

Do it now.
Gather the last light like a thief.
Strike a match in the cave of your chest.
Let it catch.

For this is first darkness.
It waits, patient as stone,
to see if you will be its pupil,
or its kindling.

The Lamp and Ashes I

I thought mystery would arrive like theatre—
a word of fire;
but mystery came as the discipline of the unseen:
a quiet hand smoothing what anger split,
mercy set stone by living stone,
the heart’s small trowel moving in silence
to hold what would fall.

So I began to carry you outward—
not as a lantern lifted for praise,
but as a hidden flame kept from wind.
I let you level my gaze
until I could meet the stranger
without hunger for rank or reward.
I learned to bow to grey hair
as one bows to snowfall—
not because it is weak,
but because it has endured.

I kept a white cloth at the waist of thought—
not a badge, but a reminder:
keep clean hands, keep humble hands,
even when the world is mud.
A beehive woke beneath my ribs,
a humming labour of care,
each small sweetness made by work,
not by talk.

When widows stood at winter’s edge,
I tried to be a door that did not slam.
When shame hung like a torn coat,
I tried to stitch dignity into the seam.

And where the common road is held by law—
that hard iron that keeps the cart from chaos—
I did not spit on it for pride’s sake;
I honoured the order that lets the weak sleep.
Yet I remembered: obedience without morality
is only a well-swept cage.
So I kept you burning—
a private tribunal of conscience,
a lamp that judges without hatred.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.