Coral

You are present. You are my present. A reader! I'm so grateful! It is not always easy for me to understand poetry, just as it not always easy to understand deep water. Perhaps, though, they are simple things, which I complicate myself. However you feel right now, I hope that you have better luck than I do simplifying complications and vice-versa. One day you may return to read a different sort of message - one in which I celebrate lucidity!

The painting above is The Monk By The Sea by Caspar David Freidrich. The one on the right is Retrato de Delores Olmedo by Diego Rivera.

Dark rushes up nautically

The fields now swallow children
whose wind-filled cries mingle with birdsong.

Call them in
when day's strict skeletons are covered by night flesh -
when the coral's intestines emerge and feed by filaments;

paralyzing shrivelled prey;
their watery tubes are an oxygen-less mystery.

Sister you are Mother - your heart extends through miles
of waving grasses and even glassy stars.

You influence the blessed. An aura surrounds you:
Home, eternal.