Holding It Together
A plea by Atlas holding the world in 2020
These crouched arms are all I own
to cradle you in a molten cluster
of ebb-tide sighs and erring bones
as I wheeze you into a portrait of paradise
You — your woken reverie
bleeding, collapsing
colors fading in panoramic sleight
Your myriad cries choking
numbed, quaked
beneath a vine of hungry hands
spattering a realm across tributaries of ache
Come summer
a river of words wilts in dread
Its long-suppressed syntax of help
stagnates stifled on an arid floor bed
Do I then dare
to cleanse a crease of your naked skin
to plant the potency of clinched faith
only to unravel doubts
sprouting in weeds of hyacinth…
And where my skin meets yours
yours — in the texture of withering verdure
mine — of prickly barb and thorn
I restrain a dam of piety and pain
all before the flood swamps us
washed away
into oblivion…
Notes: We ushered in 2020 waking up to the most dreadful news from every corner of the world. A continent on fire, rapid climate change, a precedent of war-like fury, the cost of humans overriding the planet with capitalism.
I wrote this after the Australian bushfires from the point of view of Atlas holding the world in helplessness and despair.
If you’d care to hear it, Widaad, a friend and a truly gifted poetess from South Africa, performed a beautiful spoken-word of this poem.
