Under the heartbeat’s structure lies his rite
To shake the billows of ivy’s long arms
And make roots quake to the beat of our plight
The bright crash of thunderous tambourines
Strikes through, splitting the dense, sumptuous night
Into splintering fragments between stars
Can you feel his rite beating within you?
The fire of warm blood that tells you how
You are alive? Taking his solemn cue
To enter stage right and abandon your
Soliloquy for the chorus, you threw
Your head back in ancient euphoria.
O God with eyes like secrets perched behind
Firmly closed lips, sparing your wine-dark gaze
To bring treasured rest to the weary mind
To bring priceless madness to dry cracked lips
To bring movement to stiff bones of our kind
A rite so heartbreaking, raw, and lush
Cries and laughter in spontaneous bursts,
Growing and fusing in unrecognizable
Ecstatic grandeur, quenching innate thirst.
These trees don’t so much as sway as they leap
With fervor in a violence unrehearsed.
This, his rite of movement from which life sprouts.
