Murmuration by Talullah

Legendarium Ladies April - Prompts for April 18
General Prompt: Forgiveness
Picture Prompt: All Creatures Great and Small (Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan), by Steve McCurry

Poetry Prompt: Murmuration, by Triin Paja
you say its kindness, the way dusk gathers
its skirt-hems, walks to the wheat field,
leaves. how a cat leaves an old woman’s lap,
ribbons of light fluttering in the wind.
kindness, you say, as the sun disappears in
your throat, leaving me beneath the grey belly
of the whale-sky. I hear spring shatter its
perfume bottle, the clouds clinging to tin roofs
with soft hands. I have kissed your hands.
when we cannot speak, we press our bare skin
against silence’s bare skin—I want to say
when you die they will not find blood but birds
in the body. how kindness is always forgiveness,
the thrushes covering us with the insect netting
of their song. how somewhere we pearl into
a bone-white memory, rising, collapsing,
like a lover’s breathing after a vodka-darkened
night, after the ghost of the orgasm leaves us.
how somewhere the stones are writing us,
the dandelions flickering in a kind of light.

 

Tar-Aldarion died in 1098 S.A.