POETRY
Salt of Sun and Sea
Free verse
Next to your bed I breathe
the salt of the earth in your hair
the salt of the sun in your eye
the salt of the sea of your night
In my dreams you rest on a bed of salt
preserved with the savour of life
reviving my saltwater blood
and the iron it corrodes
with the union of love and strife
And as your blood dries
slain and sustained
in the ash of combustion
your salt is the axis
of corruption and life
Your body is mineral memory
of primordial sea,
of cosmic waters freed
and revived in the salt of the ash
that I bury with love
at the foot of your tree,
the fulcrum and completion
of the same, bifold reality
Jessica Lee McMillan © 2021
Inspired by a dream, a death, and the esoteric study “The Hermetic Problem of Salt” by Aaron Cheak who describes salt as a concept for the order of the universe and its dualities in that:
salt has played a role in alchemy as the physical “body” which remains after combustion, the corporeal substance that survives death to reinaugurate new life. It was both ‘corruption and preservation against corruption’ (Dorn); both the ‘last agent of corruption’ and the ‘first agent in generation’ (Steeb). [2] As such, the alchemical salt functions as the fulcrum of death and revivification. — Aaron Cheak
