Communion
Darkness weighs
about seventeen kilograms per unit.
It tastes like salt and iron.
I have held it and tasted it.
Believe me.
The feel of darkness varies.
Some days it has the consistency
of cold molasses,
other days the granular feel
of wet sand.
I have carried it many days.
Believe me.
It is possible to cut darkness into pieces
and put it under your pillow.
This will ensure a deep and instant sleep.
But this is a waste of darkness.
Believe me.
Instead, cut your darkness into wafers
and place one on your tongue.
Let the wafer dissolve, just like a communion.
You will have visions.
You will travel inside.
Believe me.
You will have visions of a slow and lonely past
where there were many hungers
and your soul was robbed clean.
You will remember how you were
shattered and broken
beyond the word for hurt.
And when you see that despite this
you are whole and you are magnificent,
then you will begin to admire
the darkness that made you.
You will stroke its sleek panther hide,
practise its prowling, sexy walk
and fill your throat with
its deep and dangerous purr.
You will find that you can see in the dark
using only your fingertips
and the soles of your feet,
and you will find yourself
dancing a slow, fierce flamenco
of light and dark
where each in turn
leads the other.
More Than the Absence of Light
And so we mine ourselves for blackness
during the long white nights.
We burn her in our fire pits and she gives us heat
She gives us the heat that warms our marrow.
We wrap our souls inside her like infants in a blanket
Blackness is the ballast that holds us to the ground.
She moves across the earth, an implacable wind
She is the key to our freedom, the moment of escape
She quenches our fatigue.
She is basalt solid rhythm rooted in earth
She laps at the edges of day.
And when it is time to honour her pact with ashes
she surrenders our names and relinquishes our bodies
she relinquishes our bodies to dust.
Glossolalia
It was we three walking,
singing across the city,
spinning the world beneath our feet.
We were smaller then,
our figures enviable,
youth cascading,
a rush of waters down our backs.
We loved our women,
we loved our men,
but passion was our talk –
we spoke in tongues,
giving the ancestors voice,
trying to understand
their songs and silences.
In trying we baffled the long pavements,
joyous, we baffled ourselves.
The Brother of Jesus
The brother of Jesus works hard
And walks head down,
Fists inside his pockets.
The water in his cup slakes his thirst
But does not make him drunk.
The loaves of bread he brings home for his children
Divide but do not multiply.
He preaches no sermons,
Not on the mount,
Or anywhere else that matters.
He can barely get his own children to hear him.
His few friends are not disciples.
He sits with them in dark taverns where
They discuss the wiles of women,
They discuss their varied assets
And ways to unveil and bed them.
They bet on camels and drink away
A good portion of what they earn.
They mock his brother Jesus,
So earnest, so sincere,
And it seems, apparently,
Not at all afraid to die.
Walking home drunk
The brother of Jesus remembers games
With balls made out of leather.
He remembers raiding beehives
And making soldiers out of clay.
He remembers quarrels over
Who should shovel piles of steaming sheep dung.
He remembers fighting in the red dirt
Over the last piece of kanafeh.
Wine filled, swaying
And doomed to life,
He sometimes stands alone
At the edges of crowds
Who mob his lightning brother.
Jesus looks so small there –
So brown, so bright, so brave, so young
So breakable and so alone –
Despite the worshipping crowds
Who surround him.
The brother of Jesus watches with awe,
With pity and with pride,
With envy and also gnawing fear,
And stumbling away the brother of Jesus
Shakes his own dark head,
Unaware of the faint glow
That surrounds him.
