Burial
\nBy
\nJennifer Angelina Petro<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The spirits gathered around my bed
\nHooded, cloaked in darkness,
\nArms like terrible branches
\nGrasping and hungry.
\nThey wanted the child
\nI was holding, and yet I
\nWas only a child myself,
\nUnable to protect myself
\nOr the child from their frenzied hunger.
\nAnd yet they wanted the child.
\nAnd in the blackness of that midnight,
\nIn the utter aloneness of that moment,
\nAs the spirits tore at my arms,
\nI wouldn\u2019t give them what they wanted.
\nI held on to the child.
\nBut not out of heroics.
\nFor the child I held was already dead.
\nAnd I simply wouldn\u2019t give her up.
\nI wouldn\u2019t. I couldn\u2019t. And my life
\nBecame a shrine to this baby,
\nThis baby dead from as far back
\nAs I can remember.
\nAnd just as the spirits from the darkness
\nSurrounded me, and just as I sometimes feel like
\nI have become one of them,
\nThe spirit of that baby lives
\nAnd guides my every movement.
\nI cannot bring the child back
\nBut I can live in her honor,
\nAnd bury her at the roots
\nOf the Tree of Life, believing
\nShe will rise again, transfiguring
\nHowever she will into my life
\nAnd yours, informing us all, like
\nBreath, like a garden, like morning, like
\nThe wide open sky.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n