The weight was always there. Someone had plucked it from me like a ripe plum. As though it was
something to remove.
I watched them eat it, suck at it with their ugly, prickly tongues. The stone crunching in their mouth, as if it had no taste. After its sweetness slipped down their throat.
Then handed back to me, covered with betrayal and injustice. As if i wanted those things. Its sharp edges a razor cutting my thumb.
I attempted to place its pitted surface back into my chest, where pain, now muted, did not jest. Inside where beating was, i called to it.
I began to rub. It grew once again, its life not earthy,
its life not receded. I embraced, to mourn, with rose petals left on the floor.
A milky white haze emerges from the shadow of the night. The sun now long gone. It’s feverish brow. Heat giving way to the pitch of coal.
Smouldering Burning at the horizon’s edge. Bobbing on the winds exhale, the glimpse of chalk. Softness is seen.
Yet sometimes stirred by false light. Near it steers. Its dance freed by the care of the air.
To instead be drawn to its crystallised compass, the mensis of the moon. Reverberating in that blanketed space. The moth the seeker, the flight its grace.
I was once a Bride in my childhood days. Playing and skipping. Joyful on the swing in the long grass.
With ribbons and bands in my hair. Innocence is never spared. I was a bride with my dress and lipstick smeared on my face.
The house is now long empty; it was once full of grace—memories of dirt under nails, with our games of tag and chase.
The smell of biscuits, jump rope, and writing on the wall. The days when all women were once brides, dress up and make up to blush cheeks.
To see the secrets we once kept. But all women remember their little child to play with her and to be mild. With awe, wonder, sensitivity, and to dry sore knees and cheeks. Childhood days are now past, and we are now all grown. For the true home was with a child in hand, where we were once known.
