The following is a poem I have written in preparation for and in spirit of the Summer Solstice. This year, the event is also a full moon, making it a Strawberry Moon. The poem was read for a private event entitled In Light We Are Brighter, which took place on the rooftop of the Angeline Apartments in Columbia City. This poem is dedicated to Paul Nelson, an important friend and mentor, and is written after Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest. It is my intention to return to this poem in the next two solstices to engage with it serially, and add/evolve the poem based on a half-year and full-year of change.
I breathe the faces of dragons
Summer Solstice 2016, Seattle, Washington
0
Be it a body of rouge fizz that this longest day of the year is what I require?
On the lip of the coming of Saturn, a sharpened edge,
what I require to freely dance along the sky and before the moon?
A red water leaving a bitter taste.
Oh, bitter and tepid taste
the way the rust sits.
The way the braid of flavor chokes
juxtaposition before the fist of the celebrated.
No emoji left untapped
Attempts to express
To relate a sun’s kiss of fate.
The following terms of endearment:
Moaning mannequin
Morbid fool
The floating heron
Remembering the suicide birds peeping before Subaru Fleur’s roar
downcast just another Columbia City Street
just another dawn before a dawn before a dawn
light collapse
boxes of everglow
Touch face of palm to the most throbbing section of skull
This is how the ghosts go, how the ghost dance glows
This light, this light, this light
1
I breathe the faces of dragons in and out through cloak smoke, grizzled as the evergreens tower over my cheeks, pinnacled treetop tipping horizon to horizon, sealing up the sold, keeping drowned the void
symbols of ethos and logos
Visibility: the trees, threes
our comradery: what we may see, what we may access
Awakens, is approached, approaches
Terms:
maker
shifter
time keeper
the feathered serpent
The born before a sacred burn
Burning we are bright
In the light we are brighter
I breathe scales tough as nails
exhale bulges of wisdom, teeth gold coin glinted
Nearly the enshrining in the shadow alas but for you, light bearers
Scintillating: I scream
Murmuring: the public
Private screams. Public memories.
memory of the sun
memories of sun
blinding
binding agent
arousing
rousing agent
Suns speaking in tongues: memorandums
2
I breathe the farces of sibling dragons holding flames within
boulders for bellies and slingshots for shoulders
I breathe the farthest of the dragons whose languages we know not
no knowns, no nouns
Walk pavement see families hear birds
Ah, Rainier Vista, landscape the serpent’s spine
Observatories
A t-shirt off in the wrapping wind / sweat braided delta neck to soles
Pipe water burst from faucet nozzle / angleless shatter of color
Reminder: a touch: the memories of the sun, memory of many suns
Dry and cracked
Wet and sogged
Burn of the heat
Ache of the light
Presence, more presence
And your form
3
Breathe the faces: creatures wild
Screened and entoned
Uncontrolled
Entombed and scared
The tiptoe of anticipation
Lists of the fears that creep and curl
The scurry of the pound of the earlier and the later
The justice of the visage
A schedule of chiseled languages
Return to womb of day
Rise and fall of the heart
Twists of the street like lisps
Arcs of light across rooftop
A fully textured bed of hair on the arm warmed so early, gently
Thorough I breathe and I notice the breath changing
Longly I scream and I notice the reach and the control
And the whirl
A world sitting spliced upon by bone pike and the fumes of a fire
They are seen in the lenses of the eyes of many
4
The fusion of Mother, Father, and son has been symbolized as the feathered serpent—and can be found as the Mayan and Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the Persian and Roman God Mithras, and prolifically throughout Egypt. The god Quetzalcoatl, Mithras, and Horus is the Son; the serpent is a symbol of the Mother; and the feathers symbolic of the Father—it is from the union of Father, Mother, and Son that Quetzalcoatl/Mithras/Horus becomes the feathered serpent.
The serpent is a symbol of the earthly mother, as it is an animal that is at all times in contact with the earth with its entire body. The feathers are those of an eagle, which is a symbol of the heavenly Father, as the eagle is an animal that flies and lives above all others and is thus associated with higher realms. The Son is a miraculous re-conciliatory being that is both personal and cosmic, a force that acts to unite and integrate the earthly human with divinity, joining the serpent with the feathers, and thus why the Son has been referred to as the light and savior of the world in so many different cultures.
…
At the winter solstice, the divine Son is born within a spiritually prepared person. At the spring Equinox, this Son dies, becomes one with the Great Mother of the universe and resurrects. At the summer solstice, the Mother and Son “ascend” to the Father, so that the forces of Son, Mother and Father become one.
Belsebuub and Angela Pritchard, 2013
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Dear mother
Dear father
Bios, singular, fusion, root, core
I reach up and down for you
In my life I beg the questions of the rise and fall
And the begging the rise and the fall
and the life the rising and the fall
Now, rising
The lungs filled bags of air
Now, falling
Released bags of air
The blood clottable
Quotable
(I remember hospitals and care
edged flow in, out
filling, flailing, releasing)
Life is an etching
scratching upon surface
A noise settling beyond the distance
Where one can see or one cannot
It is the same
It is sonic but it is maturity
An open stance
Fulfilled
This fascination that brings us together
Flap in the face
Caw from the mountains
Skeletons of structures going up
coming down
The representation of a sunset in long delay
6
Here a sequence
I am reminded of Laughter in the Dark
A concept
I am reminded of Lake Washington
A place
I am reminded of chess sets and browning pages
The expanded divots
Growls like grommets pinning the self up
A-pinned to the T of the wall
At, before, upon
The way the light flickers before an expanse of wing
Feather a light brown beneath cerulean coolness
Feather flutter, flowers, flows
Watchface: time trickle
this is nothing but all
allergens to the calenderean chiseling
We segment. We classify. We know.
Beyond that: we have this.
A blast of shine, an open shrine, fingers in the pocket, unwavering triangulation
The first time, fiery, but no chance it will be the last