Call it hystery:
what wracks a woman’s ribs
like a map of the world.

Ancestors whisper in the bone
to fight
to rule
to hide,
to survive
to martyr
to tyrannise.

Songs half-buried by
king or state or global market
all
trade bodies for numbers
and stories for stock.

Nations vanish under banners
that burn faiths
for rival faiths.
Every colonist ploughs their lie
into the famished soil
of another.

You know the pattern well:
the small mind
that can only hold
one single truth
at a time,
a blunt stone wrought against
the complexity of flesh.

Call it hystery:
what wracks a woman’s ribs
like a map of the world.

Tonight the shadow of the Earth
spills blood from the Sun
all over the face
of the cancelled Moon.

Red she rises,
dreams in Pisces.

I watch from the chapel
on the highest hill
her reflection in the giant lake
as she breaks free from
behind his centrale nucléaire,

lets go his demand that
she self-efface,
be explained away,
be less than whole.

Red she rises,
dreams in Pisces.

I watch from the chapel
on the highest hill
her reflection in the giant lake
as she breaks free from
behind his centrale nucléaire,

welcomes in a luminaureal seed,
an embryonic oracle
of you, me, my tools and our stars,
ready, Inshallah,
for when she takes her place
in turn
between Earth and Sun.

Because we need her light

as well as his.

Call it hystery:
what wracks a woman’s ribs
like a map of the world.