She Turned, Went To Her Own Country

Many are the stars of your cape from the heavens
And very many are the lights that flock at your breast
The deaths and resurrections of your relations
Are rejoiced at in the flicker of ziggurats of candles
In tides and currents of incense.
Great is the strength of you forearm like rope
Corralling the wind and mighty is the command
That rings from your throat instructing the sow to birth
The rain to unend and my eyelids to flutter at your skin.

Do you remember the accoutrements of grace
The chattels that glittered that about you you gathered
And that in the eddies of your feet like blossom littered,
Collided and foundered. And at the great days of mourning
Do you remember the children singing and the choirs
Of widows singing and the poor men, the orphans,
The young suitors in their finery and their eyes dashing,
Ringed with black singing and weeping and pouring their insides out?
I know you remember the tracks that their tears made
In black and in grey pouring down faces

And their singing.

Many are the blossoms and many petalled are the blossoms
And everlasting are the blooms that bloom given light, heat
From your radiant skin, watered at your perpetual bosom.
If it is your eye that as surgeon-wielded steel
Quickens these mine sedimented veins then it is
Your back yet without rugosities of mountains
Becomes the perilous range exceeding the limits of vision
The alabaster saint and the painted Virgin join
With the wailing as a procession commemorates the departing.