Creature Speak

Is this some great hollowing? Is this how I’m to be made empty? To become one with the void?

Every time I think I’m close to making peace with my circumstances, the black veil returns to shroud the world in my eyes by dimming the sky.

Some say it’s hard to see in greyscale, but overcast days render colors more true.

The vibrancy in half light cannot be denied, so what is life trying to show me? 

The beauty revealed in suffering?  The hidden jewels in pain?  The phantasmic hues in the rain? 

To count the many shades of green in the trees after a storm?  To smell the scents of flowers pelted by the drops? 

The puddles formed in the mud to reflect the sun obscured by clouds and easier to behold?

To be grateful when the clouds part?  To be thankful for my heart stretched wider to receive greater light?  

The cleansed air filling my lungs when the dust has fallen to the ground to become the soil for new seeds to be sewn?

To watch the wreckage and feel the decay continually give rise to new pain that drives new life? The moss on trees felled by lighting. 

Mushrooms growing on heaps of dead leaves and casualties of culling overgrowth competing for Earth.

Soil of all that was incessantly giving birth to something new. 

For transformation is law.  And even blue skies turn black again every night when quiet light comes back in the moon.

Is this what I am?  An embodiment of land, perpetually dying to be reborn?  

Constantly becoming so I’m always at the end of something with only a thread of grace to soften my fate?  

To forever ache and suffer with no buffer for my senses?   To hurt until I surrender my defenses and restless quest for reprieve?

Is it time to leave all the searching behind because my path is to be tempered and refined in every moment?  

Is it time to let go of hope because this is my way: to find the grace in pain;

for there is no cure for a soul that burns too bright in a world becoming night?

To feel the violence of a force contained within a sheathe of skin, too thin to hold a shape.

And maybe the forces grinding me apart making the friction in my heart, are but a flint and steel to create the spark to ignite a light in the dark.

Copyright © Sheyorah Naify, 2021
All Rights Reserved.

Author’s Note: This is another in a burgeoning collection of poems about living with chronic degenerative disease which brings progressively worsening and constant pain. I’m doing my best to make peace with this through a daily practice of writing alchemy. My hope is that by sharing this, others may feel seen and less alone. I also hope to raise awareness around “invisible illnesses,” for there are many who suffer in silence because their struggles don’t show on the surface.