i am a beautiful and fucking ugly thing

THE GARDEN

everlasting is the language of your tongue, as swahili,
as we journey along godshead and in the silence is
when the sun bends around the sea and I watch as
it descends into the gold of your hair and there is something
like love that moves through me when you turn to face me
but all I see is a silhouette with this streaming hair:

“you need to learn to read the bible in Latin
because that is the language of the gods and
maybe they will listen to you and keep you from being such
a black thing, so unnamable and hopeless and damnable 
and if you would just learn how to take your heart from
your chest and stroke it back to life; find your lungs
to be these pink newborn things looking for life
and take that small child with the unruly hair and those wet
eyes and tell her they are suns sinking beneath the depths
of her skin to never rise unless she opens her mouth
and cries, you will just be the voiceless cracks in the earth.”

and I sat down and she smiled softly and came forward:

“i am not sorry that you do not know the difference between
love and hate because some days they are all the same
and if you sit here and listen to the silence with your cup of milky tea
and just exist for a moment in time, maybe you would learn
to speak all the common language with flexible, various tongues
and love all the cultures and suns that orbit the world finding
too many brown faces upturned to the heavens desperate
and forked tongues licking the ground for more dignity
and if the death toll rises maybe you can get on your knees and
pray and save some lives because you know Latin
and the gods know you.”

and I ask her how she knows all this when she cannot see the sun
because her back is to it and all she sees is my face:

“because I am you and you see for me and if you would just get
up and take my hand, you and I will dance across existence
and learn Hebrew enough for it to be special ink on our skins
and understand it all as words untranslatable, and real, and
the garden in which our immortality lays as lillies and orchids
and deep red roses like our love.”