‘To Love’ by Mara Lemanis

‘To Love’ by Mara Lemanis 

 

To Love 

 

How do I sing

a hymn

to love

without a Father

no Great Mother

to shed love

on my torn turf

bewildered Child

You and I

craft our domain

In digital worlds

algorithms

black and white

peak and pit,

we work as

stooge and wit

and live in coffins

made of

templates

codes and scripts

 

We string them

into gigabytes

of global bark

skeletal chains

of palisades

and lakebeds

of sand and bone

and seed the clouds

with Pleistocene caves,

copper castles,

marble floors,

graveyards whose

cold carpets

wall away remains

of stubborn gristle

tunneled screams

from war weary

and murdered things

the extinguished and

the prematurely dead;

 

Come night

like succubi

we leave

our coded coffins

to touch each other

in the flesh

to warm the cold

and breathe in

sweat and scent and ooze

the happy heat

of breast and loin

our bodies speak

this kind of love;

Come day

we thread our ciphers

over separate tracks;

an error

in our program

and we jump

to crouch on

a causeway

between rival trains

 

You stroke a living tree

you planted long ago

and offer me a

burnished orange

glazed with dew,

I smell the rind,

the beaming peel

flares my iris

the rounded weight

cleaves like a magnet

to my hand;

I set it in a sacred close

a tent sloped with titanium sails

preserving a viand

fresh, uncoded

preserving you

and me

in love

uncoded

 

Mara Lemanis

 

Images: 1) orangetree 2) orange

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