An Offering
Tim Hawkins
Do you remember the hour
you tumbled naked, headlong
out of sleep and the burning sky?
You found yourself, frail and stumbling
in a landscape of bone and tumbling waters,
picking berries alone,
wandering from thicket to thicket
as the juice ran in crimson tears
from the corners of your smile.
This is all I need of you:
an offering of words, like berries
collected in the loneliest hour of that day.
Whisper some small true words
not spit from the mouths
of friends,
not coughed out gasping
from another life.
Whisper some small true words
bearing the scars of your teeth and
we shall savor the harvest with our tongues.
Offer your gathering of summer storms,
or the branches trembling in your winter sky.
Offer the night moving in you.
Make an offering
of the silences roaring within
and we shall have no more need of words.
We will share
armloads or mouthfuls
of any berry you like,
first gathered in days of rage,
ripened and burning like skin,
then cooled in night-blooming silence.
Tim Hawkins
Do you remember the hour
you tumbled naked, headlong
out of sleep and the burning sky?
You found yourself, frail and stumbling
in a landscape of bone and tumbling waters,
picking berries alone,
wandering from thicket to thicket
as the juice ran in crimson tears
from the corners of your smile.
This is all I need of you:
an offering of words, like berries
collected in the loneliest hour of that day.
Whisper some small true words
not spit from the mouths
of friends,
not coughed out gasping
from another life.
Whisper some small true words
bearing the scars of your teeth and
we shall savor the harvest with our tongues.
Offer your gathering of summer storms,
or the branches trembling in your winter sky.
Offer the night moving in you.
Make an offering
of the silences roaring within
and we shall have no more need of words.
We will share
armloads or mouthfuls
of any berry you like,
first gathered in days of rage,
ripened and burning like skin,
then cooled in night-blooming silence.