Word, world, white, light.
She listens to the words of the dead about the ways to be alive.
Underneath her the earth was cracking.
What made this all but black was the tiny comfort in the giant word.
The word which wraps her like tefillin.
The word that reminds of of where she’s been.
The word that can fall into flesh without one drop of blood being spilled
And find the glow that lives in the centre of every moving chest
And then finds the truth.
And the world still cracks whilst the word lives on.
Through those fractures comes a radiant light.
It is not a fire, it is not familiar.
It could be the mythological light that we hope to see.
But no. She doesn’t think so.
It is, it seems, the light for the end of the world.
Whose world?
The world of those who word.
She is nothing but a tourist on an aeroplane of ideas and ideals.
She thinks she knows nothing, but there is much in nothing.
It is in nothing that you find that light.
She heard the dead speak about the shades of white.
Shades of white? Her male companions ask their unadorned Rabbi.
And she stands silently knowing those shades of white,
That there are infinite shades of that white.
For it is white that contains all.
Not only colour but light.
It seduces the colour and brings it to ecstasy by transforming it all into light.
She stood there beside a dusty ping pong table floating in a sea of ancient bougainvillea,
Drinking from a glass filled with painful wine and the echo of someones lips,
Watching the flexing of these scholarly gorillas and a tantric dragonfly vibrating in the corner.
She stood there wondering how she learnt the language of pictures.
Who taught her?
She remembered it was there in the dry rivers of her knowing hands.
She was a puppet until then and will continue to be if she closes her eyes enough.
She remembers her cracked hands as a child.
Cracked like the cracking earth,
Radiating that same unfamiliar light onto the white pages of her days.
Those white pages that are so much more than white.
Those pulpy pages that have been cut from trees, grown from flesh.
The flesh of those who had their own pages.
Whose pages are forgotten after 100 years, but for those shining 100 are light.
Of joy and hate and sadness and hope.
She is sure that her 100 will be ordinarily forgotten,
And the raft of hope is growing smaller as she grows bigger.
But she wonders when she shrinks into her skin and into the world,
Will her raft become larger again, for hope of that light.
And that day only before, she meets a man who measures his life in cups of coffee,
Sitting in company of the rich, who are not rich enough to help him not die before his time.
She, still young and strong and able, looks his approaching light in the eye.