The face that launched a thousand ships.
What must those eyes have held within them?
How full the lips, how smooth the jaw, how sculpted the cheeks,
To start wars?
A face can launch a thousand ships- indeed-
Send toy soldiers marching stiff across borders
Burn cities
Make widows and orphans,
But a soul...
A soul can push saplings up through the ashes of those very cities.
Only a soul can create,
Only a soul can nourish,
Only eyes with such exquisite tenderness behind them can spin the stars and press the moon into the palm of the night
Like a promise.
The soul informs the face,
Breathes life into it.
The loveliest features
Cannot pull the tides like a soul can.
The most vibrant gaze
Cannot capture time and halt its march the way a soul can.
Perhaps your face could launch ships
Could start fires.
But your soul...
Your soul could raise forests.

I think the sea will welcome you
For I've seen it in your eyes a hundred times,
And heard it crashing through your voice.
I think it has much to teach you in wildness
For you hold in you the same immense, awesome power
It wields when it crushes ships
And batters cliffsides smooth,
And the same silvered grace
It sways with when the moon trails her fingers through the waves on clear nights.

It does not apologize for its savagery,
For the way it rakes its fingers across the shore,
The way it takes.
It cannot be small.
It cannot be meek.
It cannot be silent.
It cannot be
Tame-
Its gentleness and its violence are lovers, ever embracing
And it has never wondered
Why.

It IS, and it is
Exquisite in its rawness.
It can be smooth as glass, murmuring its great hush to the sands
And yet it can within a moment
Rage!
With no shame, no restraint,
Uncontainable and
Unignorable.

I see all of this beneath your skin when your face darkens and you think no one has noticed.
I see your vastness, pressing out,
And I see you soothe it back into silence.
I see it and it moves me toward it like the tide
With its feral beauty,

Yes-
I imagine the ocean will rejoice to rise around you and hold you up as a part of it,
For there are some people- I've said as much-
Who belong to the earth in a special way.
People whose feet the ground worships
And whose face the wind kisses
And whose fingers the grasses reach for.

People whose eyes
The sea lives in.

I imagine it waits for you.

Welcome to the beginning again.
I am here to hold you up until you can stand to be aware.
I may be your demon while you wake, but as you rest I sustain you.
You created me to save you, and I do.
You hate me for my viciousness,
But I hate you for your weakness.
And I will be here, the framework that you are seared away to,
The skeleton, blackened, that remains when all the rest of you is ash from yet another thoughtless soul you reached for.
You reach and reach, unable to resist.
And I watch and watch, unable to prevent it,
And you tumble down, and I stand like steel.
Like iron.
I am your proxy,
Your venomous caretaker,
I am the one who tortures you lovingly back to life each time you give until you've bled out.
Welcome to the beginning again.
I am you,
If you had fangs.

Make no mistake
I have seen cities rise and fall
I have watched my temples burn
I have stood, solid,
As the earth cracked and withered at my feet-
I am NOT weak.
I have buried my grieving fingers in the dirt
And tried to resurrect a love
Gone to dust, gone to seed.
I have wailed at the moon like the loneliest wolf,
Bereft of the comfort only touch provides,
And I have torn through thorns and briars,
Desperate to follow its cold white light to the horizon
But I have never
Knelt
And I will not.
I worship from my feet,
My gods are larger than to care if I fall to a crawl in pursuit of them-
My worship bids me run
Jump
Writhe
Sing
But never surrender
For I must fight to love this sky
These hands
This earth whose pain and promise I have received
With hunger.
I must fight to stand
And it would be a disservice to anything I were to love
To let it knock me to my knees.