Swan Leaving Motcombe Park, painting by Harold Mockford

ELEMENTS OF HEALING

Here, they will place a shock of fire on your heart so your body will remember its living rhythm again, and how your heart can be warm, when it loves.

They will place exotic liquid chemicals or someone else’s blood in needles and syringes, pierce your own routes of water (those blue conduits roaring with tides and memories, moods of the moon) and they will sail you to a safe shore.

They will catch the air for you, in tubes and soft boxes transparent as flayed angel’s skin and they will breathe for you, slowly, seriously kiss you back into life.

On your tongue they will place willow and rosy periwinkle, chalks and six kinds of sugar, wafered like bread, your body will respond, flesh to flesh, turn away from hurt to blossom and make new, delicious fruit.

They will allow the cool magic of ether to move you from days crowded with clawed fears into a healing night peaceful as old black winter velvet. Then your spirit will grow strong and lovely as amaryllis that needed a spell of cold darkness before it bloomed like a star.

Rose Flint is the author of three volumes of poetry: Nekyia (Stride, 2003), Firesigns (Poetry Salzburg, 2004) and Mother of Pearl (Avalon, 2008).

Resurgence No. 252 January/February 2009 39