Guest Bard: Kneeling

Kneeling

“I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Don’t blame the sinner
for the slow burn of memory.
Nobody asked you to excavate the past.
You, with your excuses,
and your mouth full of poems.
Your blame longs to curl its stained fingers
around something
that feels like truth.

When will you learn
that we are merely skin,
stretched tight
over a fragile tangle of arteries and veins?
We can bleed,
or we can breathe.
Every moment is a fleeting chance
for awareness.
It is nothing short of a miracle,
that we have learned how to cry over our bruised histories.

What will you worship,
when you finally allow your knees to touch the dirt?
An orange,
with its dimpled flesh, and bitter seeds
has a better chance
of knowing God.

Reality is always fiction.
Language is a trap.
The bones of this story
were whispered to the Black Queen
long before she hurled you into this extraordinary world.
But then she turned those jagged words
over and over in her palm,
until they became a fistful of stones,
smooth and round as plums.

Karen is the author of Fat Girl In Boxing Gloves, where she entertains her love of words and writing. She has won several accolades at Yeah Write,”a writing community for writers who blog and bloggers who write.” Kneeling won Yeah Write’s Speakeasy competition in February of this year. When not writing or creating safe domiciles for dispossessed felines, Karen works as a personal chef and manages her Etsy store – thesoupison. 

You can find her at: http://fatgirlboxing.blogspot.com/

Bard’s Verdict: Karen has a way of telling stories that are common to everyone of us. Each is a personal history presented with a level of emotion and reality that is almost physically palpable. While painfully honest, identifying with her words has always brought me to a place of insight and self acceptance, that comes from realizing we are not alone in how we experience our lives. Z~