Life Descending – Poem

Perhaps, a creation story

Life Descending


The galaxies and your skin beckoned me, a curling finger saying, come.
Compelled, I gathered myself into
stories untold, mythic beginnings compressed.
Light grew heavy. Stars blackened as they fell into me.
Your hips rolled storm clouds and earthquakes.
Your lips — deserts cracking into thirst.

Calling.

An orb of chaos and seed, absolute magnitude turning.
Gravity calling my name.
The silken sky — my path. Your heat — my blazar.
Perihelion, you.

Arrival.

Impact is meteoric, irrevocable.
I find you the way lava finds the sky, the way sin finds confession.
A moon bears witness and loses its light.
Cosmic arms tighten. Nails rake stardust like rust from iron.
Hips thunder. Breath breaks into rivers.
Nova heat dissolves into time. Time stretches into eons, then softens
… impact yielding to caress.

Fusion.

We become slurry ... carbon, salt, ash, want.
No edge left intact.
Yin folds into yang, light swallowing its own shadow.
Particles wake, amorality stirs:
beauty learning its shape,
life testing its breath,
darkness opening an eye,
death waiting, patient as...

Gravity.

This sediment of collision
learned language, built hands, raised cities
from bone and dust.
From us, you gathered fire and medicine, borders and bread, lullabies and weapons.
We taught you how to kiss, and watched you practice division.
Our gravity binds and pulls bodies into graves.
We are not past this making. We are its continuation...
raw material for tomorrow’s mercy or its next ruin.

We walk your streets now.
Our slurry never cooled.
It waits in you, choosing again.

©Kim Williams, M.Div.

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash