Reincarnation

Stephen Morrissey
From:   The Yoni Rocks (Book Two, The Shadow Trilogy). Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1995.

We meet again, again flesh
and blood, again bone, tendon
and memory. Events of old lives,
clothes divested as I divested
the past in meeting you,
in meeting you again
and again and again
into infinity.
Forty years of waiting for you,
a dark delirium of the soul;
we met apparently for the first time
but home is where we are together
in this room, this house,
the two square feet we occupy
in a single embrace. The embrace
of memory, bred in muscle, eating
or favouring one side in sleep,
falling asleep in your arms.
The arms of many births,
deaths, incarnations of
gods and goddesses,
Bardic voices, Druid's potion.
Listen, we share the sounds and sights
of a summer's evening, fireflies
across a field seeming
distant but as close as
a hand before your eyes,
breath on the back of your neck;
or is it the darkened field
and firefly lights
repeating their journey
between this life and that?
With you I have
returned home, not a place
where walls enclose silence,
but soul meeting soul
in the ancient movement of time.
I lie asleep on the floor
ear pressed to the darkness
and hear the hum of earth,
the generations of families, priests,
and existence of all living things
like listening, ear to a pregnant
woman's belly, baby's rapid
heart beat; shadows fall hundreds
of feet, listen into the soul
of man preparing for its journey
of final sleep, we came
from here and return, forgetful
of our origins, or of the father

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Stephen Morrissey's works copyright © to the author.