Voice of Medusa
Eight years to climb the granite mountain,
After you turned to stone and abandoned me.
Then your voice came out of the vortex and sucked those years
into oblivion. I held you against my ear and shook; how is it that you
hold the key to turn back time, to melt the ice cap on my loneliness?
Did I dream the solitude, the pain like chain mail that
I wore inside and out,
the cyclic moon that spun above me as I ebbed and flowed,
mocking my wishes for your return,
lighting a scar across the water where my heart lived
before you hooked it out and left it gasping on the sandy shoreline?
I bore the pain, seven pounds of it, I lived all the triumphs alone,
alone I carried the fear and heartache before me like inturned daggers.
Every step brought blood but I kept walking,
I climbed the slippery sides of the whirlpool and although I never reached the rim, never touched the real world, I was close.... I was almost there.... it only took...
Your voice, killing the years, murdering my struggle, hacking down all the good things I did alone, turning my thoughts to mist and my bitterness to flux. For the seven pounds of pain we made, now almost fifty, we have to meet again,
to let the good that we did in one moment look up at you
As if you could ever be what I have been? As if you could have climbed higher...
Yet you will look at each other and eight years will mean nothing,
to you two. My screams stay silent and my heart? Where is my heart?
So tell me, voice, when we meet, will you be more than I,
will you take her from me too?
And if I look at you, will I turn to stone?
By Carey Lenehan
© 2004 Carey Lenehan
(All rights reserved)
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