Anam Cara

Invocation

Pain can turn the heart’s cradle

to stone and there is in each life

a time that cuts so deep

that the soul would unmesh,

lose itself and its wish to gather

glimpses of the face

that calls like an icon,

that the earth breathing in the heart

would harden like winter ground,

choke its own growth,

that the distance to the outside is too far,

voices become echoes that struggle to return,

the pulse slows to a thud.

I, who love you more than my life,

have brought this time down on you.

Now I sit over these quiet pages

to make from desperation a raft

of words for you to hold to me.

I trawl the lakes of the dead for help,

for spirits to anoint your head with dew,

to breathe tranquillity into you,

to keep before your closing eyes the times

we were one in a place outside name

and dream and every other face.

Girl of my heart, don’t let this pain seal

the skin of stone about you, this last time

let it pass and I will let you in to fill

me as openly as air lets in the light.