Years Later: The Tired Sibyl

Years Later: the Tired

Sibyl

Unless forgiveness finds its nerve and voice,

Unless the helmeted and bleeding tree

Can green and open buds like infants’ fists.

                                                from “Sibyl”

                                                Seamus Heaney

Aren’t they though?  Dreams I mean?  Aren’t they feminine

voices open to the throat and don’t we want to crawl

down into those warm wet walls and find our ease

rather than our prophecies?  Won’t that throat be a womb

a fur for us and be our breath for us and once again rub

our lungs without greed or intent, instead because it’s

natural, the way the nearly amputated leave their limbs

wooden or plastic or steel, at the altar of some out-of-

the-way grotto, paste their legs in the mud and absolutely

get up and walk away.  They walk away!  After they limped

in they walked out. 

It’s the putting of an ear to a soft sleep and letting it, like morphine,

stroke us into knowing all shades of dark are different and ok.

There’s sleep dark and dead dark.  There’s dark when the sun’s

behind a cumulus cloud, and when it’s courting, from her safe

distance, nimbus.  And there’s water dark, the panic of sudden

cold.  The squeeze and beat of what pulls because listen,

listen, in this dream I had a son, I had a son and he was warm

and blonde.  He was happy.  He played at my feet and a woman

I sat beside tapped my knee, tapped and petted my knee saying

It’s not your fault.  I don’t blame you.  I never have. 

And he played and played and stayed the same

age while I crawled in and out of the throat of sleep whose door

never closed for me, not ever, not entirely.