THE WATER FALLS

Before the water fell:
A man sucks on the nipples of a nursing mother,
Binding his fate to the sweetness of her breasts.
A fistful of sand bears a testament in his favour:
he learns to clutch to that golden breast that
offers threads of life on a cracked platter of pain and desolation,
in fits of imaginations.
In the bosom of the future lies the past in infancy,
reversal the order of the present: then…now…then.
Life is deep
and we are seeds sprouting deeper,
our roots in the air seeking to clasp
to an anchor riddled with our truths.
A man I am.
for I’ve been broken.
A tortoise shell is cracked, for life exists between the lines.
Darkness arise when life multiplies,
Touching the heavens in order to bear fruit for man.
I bore the darkness in my heart, riding at
its crest to harvest the stars.
It was then I lost my flesh, paying the price of my never-ending search for
the colour of my soul.
My journey with Grace is to begin before we are,
before I see her wet and bathed in
I, faith and water;
broken times a scar on our souls.

When the water fell:
Twinkling eyes
Joyful tongues
Passion and ecstasy;
a heavenly balm oozes out of the cheeks of cherub
clad in the wings of cupid.
For another she lives.
For another she loves.
For another she is clad.
For another is her future and she is his.
Happiness grows at the place where water falls,
crashing into the earth to reveal the face of God.
This is when a broken Seraph sees the light in water
and reaches out to it. Stumbling into Eden.
life becomes soft and feathery. Water becomes life
and life falls into place.
Fate takes the form of angels,
music lodges itself in the throats of birds scarred by cupid’s arrow.
Angels belong in heaven, and heaven becomes Eden.
Seraph and Cherub become two sides of a coin,
God’s face unchanging.

After the water fell:
A man’s scarred skin is a body of hope;
symbols of a never-ending Armageddon:
a sea of fire.
Time roams freely and we do nothing to stop it,
because we can do nothing to stop it, for the sun has to set in order to rise.
If I happen to fall into a trance
I might end up seeing a vision of heaven blossoming into petals,
upon which Seraph kisses his Cherub.
Memories would become frozen,
water would cause humanity to call upon them
To shed their wings and descend into hell.
The future holds nothing but the past, the present a robe.
Seraph gets up to play and cherub watches with mixed feelings.
Storms gathering above her head,
he pretends not to notice that humanity cannot escape death.
The willow wilts, and they float away on mended dreams.
A journey begins as another ends.
He gathers her in his arms as punctured
darkness envelops them both.
I see death around the corner,
Seraph and Cherub the harbingers of doom.
My trance happens to fall into a pocket of reality,
I end up watching a vision of a blossoming heaven unfold.
The rest is destiny.
————————
Poetry © Abalanne Xafulo
Image: Pixabay.com remixed