Ashes and Dust

Within the dying embers of the sun we lay
in the blissful gold-dampened silence.
Our hearts, together, float with the shallowness
off of our breaths and the gentle whip of the wind.

The encompassing water falls among
the cascading swiftness of our feet as they push
our run towards the freedom the future holds
Or, at least once held for us.

The thunder claps and the torrents flow
with lightening force behind us,
our skirts billowing in the whistling gale
that forever shirts the boundaries of our consciousness.

The ground quakes with the laden
footsteps of those who run behind us,
those who make the fire burn upon our backs,
and the pain flows where they repeatedly abuse.

Their eyes are passionate with the hate
that they know lives twicefold in us,
the flow of "natural" reverses upon itself,
our subservience abandoned

As our laughter echoes through a place of
ashes and dust,
once of greener sweat and where our blood
flows past our scars to the cracked and thirsting ground.

But now we hide among lushness,
swaying beauty and cascading skies,
where strokes of the deep blue thunderous clouds
vacantly look for a way from their broken despair.

Like gunshots, they are loaded tempers,
waiting for the trigger to be ever so slightly touched,
pushed beyond the limits of the ashen sky
and the bloodied ground.

Deep wounds that lay,
festering and refusing to heal
upon our laden backs,
carrying too much pain, hate and sorrow.