you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
There is still the darkness pressing in around them, and the things that hide in the dark are out there circling still. Ipomoea can feel them, even when he cannot see them — he supposes there was kinship in the shadows. Dark calling out to dark, night to his heart.He can see it, too, when he looks at her. She had the same cracks as him, the same spaces in which shadows gathered.
And he can feel the flowers of his lungs trembling like so many petals being torn free when she breathes her confession. He is trying to pull them back together, trying to be a rose instead of its thorns, a blackbird singing instead of an eagle screaming for war (and justice, and reparations, and peace — but peace never came without violence.)
“Forgetting leaves more scars than it heals,” he tells her, because he can see the cracks of them scattered in the lines of her face. “You shouldn’t want to forget. You should want to remember—“ he sighs, and his words are lost in the music that filters past the arch like water. He wonders how he is not lost in it, how he has not yet been reduced to a ghost like so many others, like all the bones left weeping in the ground.
“—remember the good things, instead. They are more powerful.”
And then he is stepping forward at last, stepping into the music that he does not remember the sound of. He has not felt like a song, or a poem, or a story in so long — there has only been discord in his steps, and his voice, and his eyes every time he turned them to his forest and saw the memory of flames instead of helicopter seeds.
But he wants to. He wants to remember how to be the soft curl of a morning glory opening in the evening, and the shush, shush, shush of a willow against the water’s edge. He wants to be a thousand things that do not know the sound of war drums and screams.
He wants to be someone who remembers how to dance.
So he smiles at her, and dips his head in both a bow and an invitation. “Maybe we can remember together,” he tells her when he turns into the light of the bonfires. And he tries to follow the pattern of the other dancers’ hooves, when he falls back amongst them.
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thank you for another lovely thread. ♥
