dewy flower, image by Myriam Zilles, on Pixabay
~child-heart
“For You are our Father though Abraham does not know us” (Isaiah 63:16).
The child-heart in me cries
from long ago
when I was broken to a legacy
of sorrow.
The child-heart in me cries
afraid of nights.
With unhushed nightmares, unkissed hurts,
the grown-up fights.
The child-heart in me cries
but no one hears,
or if they do — no arms can gather in
my clench-fist years.
The child-heart in me cries.
Much of me’s false,
but my last sound
will be the sobbing of my pulse.
The child-heart in me cries
and cries and cries
its undeterred
first trauma, heartache, hunger-word:
Abba.
Abba.
Abba.
_____________________
mountains-greyscale, by Isabel Chenot
~reconciled
The wind that blew the grasses
blew my hair.
There was a moon-curve and a mountainside.
I was as small as grass, as slanted
through the air.
— I think I was as beautiful.
The earth was breathing. And the atmosphere
was pressing love down on the little things that grew,
till we became intelligible.
Until I queried life, and knew.
Life came as clear
as prayer.
We had not wandered
to arrive, but there
below the moon —
I was.
A cowpath shone.
I told you
I was glad to be alive.
____________________
~ “Woman”
“Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1)
I am a woman who was drawing water at the common well,
one noon —
my life too common and confused in all its convoluted steps to tell —
though I had started seeking something true.
But I was false.
And every step I ever took, I fell;
and I had given up;
and I was merely coming to draw water at the well.
But you were drawing, all my convoluted way,
up till that noon.
*
I am a woman who was taken in my course of day,
and dragged into your court, accused.
I stood there 'til the other voices died away:
you asked for my accusers,
and I answered “No one” — while my heart said,
You.
But you defended.
The sentencing
was your voice, telling me the past had ended.
I was new.
*
I am a woman who was weeping in a garden
by a tomb —
and no one understood what I was seeking,
what I had buried in my years.
Not even I could fully understand
all of those tears.
You called me from the earliest garden, “Woman”;
asked me why I wept, whom I was seeking.
All that I had known in part
was in your voice.
When you asked, I knew
the thing that died and broke my heart
and I said, You.
My heart said,
You.
_____________________
Isabel Chenot’s work has appeared before in Spirit Fire Review, as well as in
Indiana Voice Journal, Assisi, Avocet, and Blue Unicorn, among other journals.
For a preview of West of Moonlight, East of Dawn, her retelling of an old fairy tale,
visit westofmoonlight.art.
August 2021 issue