Awake

Inaudible priestess: I found you in the scrap-yard's darg
mangled beneath bundles of razor-wire,
stretching open your mouth
in an attempt to scream.

Your lips: pale-veined, bruised and crisp
from exhaustion of miming
the disc-saw’s deafening wail.
Your eyes: bleared with cataracts of wincing
to the mallet’s strike.

Founder of the darkest religion,
creation's cut of itself
through self-torture,
I dragged you out
through reams of oil and diesel pools,

removed, surgically, every barbed steel hook
from your bloody skin
then laid you out on the tarmac
in the recovery position.
The sun burned a platinum corona
behind the crane's towering atmosphere.

Acrid and silent, the scrap-yard ceased its dredging.

From the invisible spring hidden amidst a thousand
corroded barrels, - earth's deepest secret -
I brought intangible water that was like light
but heavier, the placenta of light,
and cleansed your hair and pores.

Awake

Your first breath, your eyes,
shuddered with repeated shocks of being alive, living,
in a world of stopped machines.

Beautiful Lady, you almost drowned.
Mother of wonder, you are in good hands.