Godspell
If your life were anything,
It would take the shape of a liturgy,
A sprawling tumult of notes
Blown clear from a
Tuba held steady in the
Hand of the great God.
The first chord whistling in D Minor.
Determined.
Resounding.
As thought becomes word
Becomes deed
Becomes flesh
In a coupling.
Two bronzed ochre bodies writhing in lusty ardour, love trailing, dangling, just out of reach.
In the place of love —loss— in all her cavernous, stymied enunciation
Smiles as cells fuse, cleave,
And spirit is funnelled into resultant seed —you.
A sacrament caught, for a time, in matter.
A thing that will never,
Can never,
Belong.
You are conceived not of love but of grief.
You know sorrow before you know breath:
Sorrow of the seas clanging,
Crashing strange symphonies into networks of veins singing like
Salted streams;
Sorrow of the stars in free-fall,
Where once they pockmarked the velveteen deep, now
Yawning void
As they nestle within sinewy sockets and become
Your eyes.
Sorrow of the heavens in tumult,
Of the earth reeling,
Troubled, as it is, by the
Arrival of a whirring breve,
By the fleshy reconfiguring of
So great
A star.
Of grief you are called
And of longing.
A longing shaped like loss,
Like absence stirring,
Like the desire for a kinder life.
A longing that settles in your atoms,
Even as loss becomes your substance and grief fashions your scars.
Yours is a song preordained in chords more sombre than ebullient.
A song brimming with all the memories of all the ages.
Yours is a strange beginning
Seeding an even stranger ending.
And in-between, litanies of loss swelling,
Like the brackish waters of a
Delphic creek,
Rendering the contours and
Splitting of your
Beating heart.
It does not begin with you.
Nor does it begin with them,
The creatures
Entwined
In lusty keening.
The man with skin like husks of sun-baked kolas,
The woman with skin as russet as his is dark.
Your song begins
Many lives before,
In a season of toil, sweat, tears and endless dreaming.
A season which soaks up the heat of the young sun,
When saplings blossom and people —though flawed— are open.
A season of love in the midst of anguish,
Idyll in the midst of war,
Life in the midst of long night,
Of faith in the midst of terror.
A season of hope
Hidden in frailties.
A season of blood.
Yes, a season of blood.
Yet all seasons exist for a time, times and half a time and eventually,
Draw to a close.
There is blood and hope,
Faith and life,
Idyll and traces of love
In your season, too,
But the blood is, for the most part,
Ailing.
It is a blood that is forged in
Forgetting.
A blood which struggles
To breathe in
A season of not warmth,
But heat.
A blood that does not know what it is to dream.
It is into this season of fire and forgetting that you enter,
Like rain,
Remembering.
And within that remembering
Is contained a
Godspell.
A tonic
For a world grown cold
And a light that shines
Bright
In the dark.
— Godspell, Mary Ononokpono