I want to find the words that will comfort and reassure you. I’ve written and deleted so many sentences and paragraphs and I have none that do this, or any of the other tragedies the community has faced lately any justice.
Instead, I leave you with the words of Andrea Gibson in their poem Ashes
The night I was torn from the pages of their Bible
and burned alive
my ashes came down like snow
and a girl who had never seen my face
saw me falling from the sky
and laid down on her back to make an angel
in the powder of my bones
From heaven, I watched her,
‘though my eyes were still flame
and my ribs were still blue,
they didn’t win, I whispered
as her arms built my wings
they didn’t win
Look at that moon
it is a pebble in my hand
tonight, I could skip it across that fog-drunk sea
to the lashes accordion in the night
and all they know of hate
is that it couldn’t beat the love out of me
that when they dropped me to the grave,
I fell like a bucket in to a well
and came up full;
carving my lover’s name in to the skin of a weeping willow
that had spent its entire life laughing at the rain
Hold me like a lantern;
staircase my spine
When they bring the children to my funeral
to scream faggot at my dust
tell them
I was born in to their casket
but I wouldn’t pull the splinters from my heart
any more than Christ
would’ve pulled the thorns from his crimson head
They can come a thousand times
with their burning match
and their gasoline
with their hungry laws
and their empty mouths
full of prayers
to that God that greeted me at his gates
with his throat full of trumpets
and his tears full of shame
as his trembling palms
collected the cinder of his children’s crime
I know what Holy is
I know that the soul is shaped like a bowl;
I know the lies we try to fill it with
and we spill too often the orchards inside
but my lover’s shoes were tied with guitar strings
and when I walked beside
there was a silo in my chest;
there was a field full of sun;
there was a river full of gold
that we left
to pick our sweet hearts from the trees
that kept uprooting tombstones
so the names of the dead
would crumble in to poems
Write me down like this:
say my ashes never made the news;
say the jury was full of shotguns
and say the snow that fell on the tip of your tongue
refused to melt away
say this
to the kids hiding their heart beats
from their father’s fists
I planted the garden of my kiss;
I opened the night with my teeth;
I loved so hard that when they pressed their ear to the track,
the train they hear coming will still be my chest –
a rumbling harpoon; a sky they can not bury
Look at that moon
I am a pebble in her hand;
a harmonica held to the mouth of the river where
nothing
ever
burns
- Bad Weather And Mutual Aid - December 22, 2022
- Matthew Berdyck - December 2, 2022
- On Grief And Tokenism And Friendship And A Hundred Billion Other Things - November 28, 2022
Thank you. Seeing so much silence in the face of so much terror has been rough. As I become more comfortable with being myself, I know that I risk greater visibility and presenting a more obvious target. The fear in my heart has been quietly growing, but it helps so much to see words like yours.