Some Kind Moot
(to be sung)
by Penelope Sayles
Beyond twin pyres,
Breathing under autumns’ sleep’d smoke
Her own deep centre remembers
And her centre
Shedding limits long won,
Warns of sharp summoned dream
Here, beneath twin banks
Of earth and stone
Too late.
Toward the chalken burial
She jumps the quarried ditch,
Skirts the dirt scarp,
And he screams.
A cliff edged red and crumbling,
Whisper shaken from boar’s tusk
Cruelly taken, foully shook,
And he screams.
Full eyes moving
he is moving and
her bones plead boundaries still,
But her centre knows him,
This boy grinning playing
Dancing the binding upon her.
And she is bound.
Hard roots knot her feet
Moss soaks her hands
And soil grips her throat.
An iron blade rusts his hands, his tongue,
And there is nothing else,
She must speak his name.
Then she flies,
Easily up,
Away,
Through night empty air.
He screams
And she lands facing him.