High over the heat-haze, I hover,
heart-hurled, wing-wrung in the updraft,
I wheel on the cry of them:
rag-torn, ash-streaked,
breaking away from the flame and the Fall.

Below me -
their world unhouses itself,
timbers flicker and vanish,
the orchards gutter and spit;
smoke climbs like the old prayers.

And they -
they do not look back long.

One turns. Another. Then all -
faces flung upward, gasping-wide,
as if struck, lightning-halted,
a voice that outstrips the burning.

COME

Not thunder. Not wind.
But a weight in the marrow, a bone-raw calling.

They climb.

Through strangler fig and lash-vine,
through blue-flower scatter,
hands blooded on stone,
lungs scraping,
ever ascending -
towards a rise of earth the Sky has chosen.

Rain finds them halfway.

First a scatter -
then a sheet -
then an engulfing:
soot runs, grief runs, the black of them loosens and falls;
Storm-washed, their chests open.

Above, the clouds close in.

White upon white the air folds inward,
veiling the height, the haven, the held-place.

I dip, I turn -
and I lose them.


Penned by my hand on the 19th of Mayan, in the year 1002 AF.