(Csilla)g
(“Csilla” is a Hungarian name derived from the word “csillag”, meaning star)
These are the secrets I cannot keep:
How she bends over the world to plant a goodnight’s kiss,
That her scarred arms hide underneath kitchen cloths, behind books and Sunday’s wishful thinking. The sunrise drips from her tired back in the morning, Dawn makes her coffee and time flakes
And when the night falls, she scatters into beams.
I sleep on her curved spine
No trace of fret on her lips – I don’t know where she puts it,
Yet she hides, always behind the regimes that once tied her hands
There are ghosts that can touch her, I can see them in the patchwork of her iris
Spits of green and gold – a decoy for what the world could never hold.
In the dark she asks, “what’s in a name?”
“Nothing if no one says it”. It’s easy for you, and me but
There are tyrant potters in her brain - took her years to break the mould.
Rearranged, shoved in her pockets but the pieces still poke through, from time to time -
She stands tall, but the sun always casts a shadow.
----
Warm Winter, in her secret garden,
Work shoes and afternoon naps
A foreign language, a flowerbed for maps
She’s on her knees, violets growing around her soft limbs
But when the birds turn, hard raindrops fall from her eyes, she hides
It under the bed, in the closet, on top of the
Shelf, in her head; she cries softly, watering the lilies, a storm over the koi pond.
----
These are the secrets I cannot keep:
That if all the grains of sand would swap for her thoughts,
Children could play forever in her sandpit. Every touch since my bloom was prophetic –
A summer’s haze dares not to substitute her warmth
She is an eternal bud of light, uncovered by the blanket of the sky
She is an everblooming tree, every step leaves a delicate footprint where I can grow
Even the lilies come out for her laughter
I’ve discovered something in the dark
A silence pregnant with meaning,
It was no Greek that led me to the truth, but I know this;
She will love me through the mist and the dirt
That erodes my feet and the time I leave my nest,
I cry in her arms. She laughs, says “It’s fiction, my dear”
Forgiveness at her fingertips
The night sky is empty, but in us, lies the blossom of truth -
That it was her the magi had followed,
Sweet root of the cosmos: The theology of mothers,
And I am an heir to such divinities.