Hand to Earth by Rebecca Brewin

Hand to Earth by Rebecca Brewin, Index, Writing, Yoga, Retreats, Workshops, Info/Contact

SLIDE OF PREJUDICE

This sentence that drums
And amplifies me through to bone,
Locks hairline to thigh and toe,
Draws my false body floating
From the lake into the surface world
Is surely enough madness
I can do no more;
To reach down towards you
Or up to them or him or theirs
Drowns me over and over,
Shivers me cold, too much risk.
I hesitate, behind the wheel,
There is a shimmer in the roadside,
The trees are spangling
And spreading
Their coppery, kind hands
Across the shafts of light,
Insistent on break through.

There lives a bias towards beauty, truth, whilst the gutter, where I have left fragments of my
unwanted shame, remains stagnant and unvisited. Yes, I skirt a pathway where your prejudice rubs
up against mine, its hands clench my heart, where I cannot say the season in which we might
hand-fast our differences and set back on the road again, where all can be said in some dream
vessel that angles into freedom, from what is right or wrong.

Maybe I have been waiting,
Hemmed in by a bias of silence
Where I am sown seed by seed
Into that un-named, untouchable
Wordless reward for persistence.
Life creeps like a distant father figure,
Edging the forest boundary
Where my unborn child slumbers.
And I am woman now,
We have been ripped from inside
The cage of rib, lung and skin,
And these branches of the tree,
Freed from the fruits of death,
Are now just waving us on.
The stark imperfection of it all
Unties the knot of chance,
And walk us into what is given;
Grace, grace, grace.