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