Christine Salkin Davis (Focail do a Chara)

May the threshold to the new year bring you peace.
May the doorway to each new day
awaken you
with a smile on your lips
and hope in your heart.
May you have rest for your body
and a spark of love within yourself
for yourself.

May your struggles lead you swiftly
to the shore of your awakening.
May you find yourself
and may you wait patiently
to be found.

May you realize the door to your prison
has been open all along
and may you have the courage
to walk
into the light.

© Christine Salkin Davis, 2020

Sometimes you're caught in a riptide of grief
and the waves threaten to pull you under.
Sometimes you look at the veins on a leaf
and it fills you with a sense of wonder,
the sun dazzling off fall's golden leaves,
when shadows lengthen and darkness deceives.

When you're caught in that moment when fall turns
to winter, trees bare before the first snow,
the bleakness of browns and your heart simply yearns
for some color to break up the fallow.
In the pause you await, the darkness speaks;
the voices of the night are what you seek.

The moon is full tonight, so awaken,
welcome them, wisdom of the ancestors.
This, the hardest thing you've undertaken,
buried deep, your life-long longings, preserves.
The body, soul, and ground beneath your feet
hold the secrets in your body's heartbeats.


© Christine Salkin Davis, 2019

I come from a line of embodied ventriloquists --
          people who spoke through their bodies,
muted from fear,
blinded from pain,
crippled from oppressive anger,
unable to catch a breath in the stale stench of disappointment and loss.

I run in the dusk of the evening,
not from the angry mobs brandishing torches and burning homes of my people,
nor from the brutal weapons of starvation my ancestors fled,
but from my own fears --
          obsolescence,
          descent into meaninglessness,
my own demons of the night,
terrors and shadows of the dark.

I want to know,
          did they speak up and what did they say?
          What words of protest sprang from their lips?
          What words were whispered in the dark
          that told them it was time to go?

I carry their wounds and scars in my DNA,
and I hope they will whisper to me
          when it is time to speak
          and when it is time to go.

© Christine Salkin Davis, 2019