this is for you if once-upon-a-time you started off with your hands full, walking towards your promises with all the faith and trust and love, believing that it was all going to be fine, you with your soft heart, you with your soft skin, you who learnt how to wrap your arms around your head, and your body, and your children, you who knows how to turn the other cheek, your whole body, you who knows how to undress so that the bruises don’t show, you with your mouth full of ordinary stories, stories that know how to fall out of an unwilling mouth, stories that know how to cover fractures and bruises, you who took all the thread you had in your deep pockets, you who made a life out of trying to stitch up the holes, you who knows how to cover things, you who knows how to dress things up, you who knows how to darn and how to make something out of nothing, only to find the fabric tearing away, thinning itself, unwilling to be made into anything beautiful, already threadbare from the start, you who doesn’t know which way to turn, you who prays for things they have stopped believing will ever come, you who lives invisible, you who is owned, you who wants out, you whose every cell contains fear.
i would like to give you a talisman to hold onto when you are afraid, something soft and downy, a thing that doesn’t ask you for anything, a rare thing, like the hair on the back of a new-born baby’s head, how it still remembers the tender weight of the hands that spun it out of nothing—God, if you believe, otherwise you might call it a gossamer miracle, either way they are the same, but today i only have this—last night’s moonlight finding me in milky pools on the windowsill, the memory of it, and if you are able to see my words behind your eyes, there inside that vast hidden room in which only you know the furnishings of—the familiar feel of them, that rich inner cathedral to which you escape, then take this with you, a small thing to hold onto, a shape that might fit the palm of your hand as it moves at once to make a tight fist, to brace, to prepare for impact, but instead finding ribbons of light trailing all the way from sun to moon, hope reflected, a pure thing, how there is always enough light to wake us up, to stir us, our soft bodies straining to find the way home. i think this will be enough.
everything is ok, everything is ok, and i am shaping a prayer out of the thinnest air, out of the atoms that bind me to the places where my bones grew to fit my skin and my skin stretched to fit my bones, and isn’t it all a wild miracle how we are still here, and there have been a few once-upon-a-time times that had much sharper edges, and so i know that i can do this, and i have been given other lives that saw me stunned at what-i-did-not-see-coming and it is so easy to slip fear over my shoulders, it fits me so well, and if you were here with me as i write this, i would lean over and whisper into your ear, tell you the names of the things that find me when i am not drinking tea, or making lunch, or taking a boy-child to the dentist, and how they follow me on their clay feet, how they move so fast holding their chains, how they chinkle-chankle when i turn to look at them, and today when i stopped by the water, the loch dressed in olive green, and the swans and how they kept one baby alive, only one, there are always foxes about don’t you know, other mothers with babies whose bellies need feeding, but somehow one survived, and isn’t it a wild miracle how things keep on living, and how they sat down, the things-that-remind-me-of-what-i-should fear and what-might-still-happen, swinging their hairy legs in the watery winter sunshine, waiting to see what i would do, waiting to see if my hands would waterlilly themselves into the soft shape that says ‘please and thank you’, the way that i told my eyes to look for the light and nothing else, my mouth a common prophet knocking on God’s back door to ask for water, even as i wait for the wine to find your cup.
liezel graham 