How The Sky Came

  

When I was a grain of sand,

I saw a rainbow robe

the sea - the weather passed

and turned me into

rock.

When I was a rock

dust and tears made a bed

inside of me, until

a mountain I rose.

When I was a mountain,

protecting beasts and people

from the city’s pillaged tongue,

giving them sanction

beneath my hard shawl,

a hand swept down

and destroyed my peace,

turning me into sky:

a castle for the stars.

Allison Grayhurst

Seasick

            Lovers of winter

weep for the strange

constellation that

gave birth to their

joining.

            Notes of music rise

like a boy

from the river

giving air to a free

sadness

            I remember

how well & true

your lips established mine

with their tenderness

            There beside you,

mute & marvelling, we should have

given less

to the shadows . . .

            for the firedogs have

crept into the rainwater,

and your smile

splits the cloudbanks

no more

Allison Grayhurst

Treading Water

I hear the wild birds

sing beneath my skin.

Too many bitten souls,

walking by, bursting

with anguish.

The moonlight

is an avalanche, pouring

through the darkness: a dry ocean

inside the clouds.

Life is so generous

with its gifts, but these hands

like razors slaughter the sky

with world-worn

concerns.

Bare feet on grass,

feels only the stones.

Who craves the perished sun? Do I?

Do I love for nothing but death?

To be blinded by ecstasy,

to feel the tears of wonder flow

to hunt for the colossal Self . . .

I walk through the dust-ridden morn.

The wind splits my shell:

It enters. It knows

everything.

Allison Grayhurst

Of Things Unseen 

I cannot speak the simple lie

or whitewash the canyon’s depth.

I cannot flow through like

a wave, tender, lucid, despite

the storm.

Suddenly, the butterflies are huge

like intuition, like a birthday cake glowing.

A mutual silence between the stone

& the sand’s finest grain.

The wind is coming from the meadow.

People are talking of things to come

that will enthrall, and maybe

injure. I have loved you with

my eyes closed & ears pressed

to the aging dream. I have loved you

lying alone with a stallion’s

fury and a mare’s soft fight.

I have borne my suffering

as a heart bears what it can,

living only

to praise.

Allison Grayhurst

No Ground

There are no leftovers,

no cylinder funnel to collect

and preserve extravagant prayers.

In this place, I lean but I dare not cry -

a rosebush past its prime, brittle in the sun.

I am collapsing, out loud, 

reforming every cell, painful alterations. My God

of fluid, my God, grand as, and grander than, myth -

I have cut through this horizon. I have cut

through my thick interior, and still, I’m tilting

like an old tree

unable to stand. My God,

breathe into me, make plans for my soul or let me die,

bound in this circle. My God, rain into my reservoir -

it feels so long

since I have been untethered.

There are other worlds. There is Jupiter.

My God, please repair this punctured deck

or throw me overboard.

Fill me, my God, with love,

strong enough to override the weight of this

       hard endurance.

Allison Grayhurst

It is time

to let individuality out,

and not be smothered by the material plain.

It is time to labour on just because

there is a circular motion to all things

and gravity does not have the last say,

because human compassion is limited, but God’s is not.

 

I saw the key fall into the gutter. I fell

down the top flight of stairs. Mosquitoes blinded

my hunger for the deeper truth. I am ready

to not be ashamed. I am ready

to stand in the centre of my peace, live

as I was meant to, seeing

lack and disappointments as gifts

in spite of it all.

Allison Grayhurst