Welcome to Gaia! ::

I. Home

For seven years I have slept here when Mother
Permitted it; have wasted so and so many days squaring spine and shoulders
To fit; have learned the long line of here's shape with hands and with elbows:
The secret spaces, hand in glove, embraced by walls from head to toes.

If I could, I would sketch it, and this so-called poetry would seize eyes, in
The curve of the birch tree, the windows,
The wind-through-glass sighs. But the pencil would break before my hand captured
What has for seven years left me thusly enraptured.

And these words are only flit-flitting reflections
Of silent, inadequate thoughts - apportioned to their respective cold section
Within the darkness behind the blinds. Home, I am told, is where the heart is
But in the place I here pen, it is that of the mind.

II. Between

The rift waits; and above the sky hangs low, ash-choked, grey, dark cloud bellies
Lit orange and unholy; and below the land heaves, high, dry, cracking for the heat. Above and below
And between them stretches a lonely soul, a fool Atlas with soot on his shoulders and soles.
In his hands, the rift: the thin line of fire that is his only terror, his great shame.
What fire this? What flame -
That so illuminates the world with its strange earthly glow?
Not dawnlight nor dusklight either; not the cast-off of celestial orbs. This is the light of the core of the world -
Of the caverns subhuman that run red-and-sorreled
With iron and molten gold, free-flowing, free-lost.

His hands are burning brightly for the light of it. He holds it, and it embraces him;
The blaze within him and without him, clutching with tender fingers
And sharp tongues
His fragile flesh, 'til he is bound
In chains of glory. The rift, the rift, it waits, and it calls, and if he moves, he is given, he falls,
The rift he has made and has made him.

Dare he step forward? Dare he aspire to avail
Himself of the stars that dark-bellied stormclouds might veil?