Until After the Breaking

“Love has no meaning until after the breaking”
from Sara Maitland’s Virgin Territory

Blue One leaps
over bees and yellow flowers,
playing the flute and singing too.
A happy youth, all day long
cavorting in the garden.
Surrounding Blue One,
rainbow light and thunder.
Blue One leaps and laughs in me.
At the edge of the garden
I stand before a fortress,
with many doors, all ajar.
An underground torrent
roars and gushes through the doors.
Young Blue Tara/Krishna Boy,
I stand at river doors and let
the waters break me into shiny drops.

Then I cannot find myself.
My many tiny flutes
make wrenching, questing music.
We are swept and lost.

Close above the waters
sail dragonflies of turquoise,
their fairy bodies arrowing
away from the fortress of grief.
They seem to know,
they follow the flow.
They guide my lost and seeking music
on to a vaster garden.
On a bank in an emerald meadow,
I’m lifted whole again
by a hundred thousand dragonflies.
And when they set me down,
Blue One among the bees and flowers,
I wonder at my fresh-made self,
and how it is that love
has no meaning ‘til after the breaking.

Here in the healing gardens
I find my Krishna/Tara heart,
its scars grown inside out,
and sing a song of truer trust.

©Susa Silvermarie 2022