The Temple Of Her Lips

In my silent dream of divinity
A fragile angel fell to earth
Caught in the butterfly net of my prayers
There in the dust of the path I pursued
She played without companions
Alone and unprotected
A vision of innocent light too rare to go unpinned
To the pages of selfish desire

But there instead the hunter fell
Prostrate before he preyed
Knelt and wetted a cloth with my tongue
To clean away the dust from her nose
The temple of her lips

From her perfect coal black eyes

I brush the soft back of my hand
Across the uncertain blush of her face
Pounding her heart with mine
Is pounding
A rhythm of breathless need

And with a healer’s loving skill she cuts
An open path to my heart and past
With eyes that pierce my helpless soul and press
Shards of light through the gaping wound
To mend my flesh with cauterizing blades of fire
For surely I would have bled to death
If she had not been
So generous with her light
– Nepal
Breaking her heart with mine
Is breaking
A rhythm of death and grief

And with a healer’s loving skill
She speaks the words of the perfect poem
That has no perfect replication,
No simple translation
Cannot be narrated or given other reason to rise
To our artistic beck and call.
We are helpless before her
As she is before us
The fluid epic writes itself over us
Tooled by god
And given titles
But refusing the simple prayer of naming
Or knowing beyond the desperate moment.

Photo Credit: Gerald Forster, The LightYears Project