Hung

And I am hung in thy net.
To writhe is exhausting but involuntary.
And I am cut off by its weave
from the world that shines inward upon me.

How consoling that I am so small
compared to the joy I cannot feel.
A net cannot catch sorrows dripping
but oceans of joy will dilute the drops.

My rhyme and my beat are both broken;
Eros is only a ghost that I dream of;
Nature is encased in rigid constructs;
And I, most precious self to me, am lost.

How will you go from me, O God, when I die?
Will you not perish in me?
For what was your creation of me
unless you made yourself, in me,
mortal? Let not your image perish in me.
Let not your world perish when I die.

Like drunks men stumble, in me,
living the gray moment of their death.
And I, most precious self to me, am lost,
A ghost before my time, holding out hands,
clad in white whispers, calling my own name.
My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

“O Love that wilt not let me go,
I hide my weary self in thee.”
Therefore: no self, no Love, no hiding place.
Death is thy net. I both live and die.

Hidden within the dying woman
may be the the one that, undetected, lives.
Suspecting this, I find no trigger to pull,
no corpse to bury. I must writhe,
divided, exhausted, until thought cease and
the gift is returned, and
light streams in under the door.
But how this may be I know not.

Alana Roberts

I suffer death

his hard blue sting

his theft of breath

his hammering

Yet though worlds fade

before my eyes

I'm not thus made

the thing that dies.