It Hurts to be Human

[Guest guest]

Inspired by the play Beauty and the Beast

By Eugene Halliday and dedicated to Steve Irwin

 

 

 

If we could just get to that hurt,

to that emptiness gnawing

so deeply inside

so very deeply that our hearts

had to harden,

had to close to protect

that soft-shelled creature inside,

like bats reaching

for the moonlight,

echoes carry us on shining wings,

memories of how it was before

100 years of solitude forced us

to face the Light.

 

If we could but remember when it was

why it is

that it is

we who live within

locked cages,

holding our own keys--

to our true nature,

human fallibility

infinite improbability

and truly incorruptible

almost imperceptible

and inaudible beneath our own breath

disguised under dark cloth-- layers of flesh,

we burn away at the sight of fire in

holy accordance with the books of all the dead

obliged

to feel the wind,

quenching the holy flame,

calling in sad and lonely

songs of brine,

in our turquoise names

and hollow reeds

before the sea of tears drowned

us and we had no choice

but to stop breathing

Light,

and this is how we are of air now,

 

And this is why

we must learn to fly on our human wings,

teach one another before

the world dies to all the hunger inside,

These colours that would claw us

that

we do not even begin to know

how to dance to,

how to hold the melody

close to our lips.

 

 

We are white doves

hidden in the barbed tail of a manta ray

swimming with the wet passion of distant starlight

we are graceful flowers,

bending and swaying

to sing a song of praise,

howling with our beastliness,

 

If we could tell the story

in a sand mantra,

painted

not in harsh words and sounds that wound,

if only

we could touch one another

.... deep enough

to pierce through our hearts,

bleeding ...

 

through and through.

 

It hurts to be human

It hurts to love.

 

 

 

 

Anna

 

9/10/06