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Hanging by a translucent thread,
Suspended from a shaded twig elusively secreted,
She lingered curled inside herself,
A shadowed self bound,
Chrysalis-like,
In glossy threads of dormancy.
Protective layers confined her in a life denied,
Robed her in a cocoon of silken solitude.
My voice called to her like lapping evening sea murmurs
Brushed by with wispy breezes,
Hardly a sound loud enough to be heard.
Except by one hungering to emerge
Into the sun and embrace herself as she was intended to be.
At last, the shelter of her dormant life unraveled,
Twisting away, dissolving, to unveil transparent wings,
Fluttering tenuously in the whispered air of my voice.
I beckoned to her,
Unfold your papery wings,
Become who you were meant to be.
Outward she stretched from her heart's isolation
On wings extended,
And soared.
She had been there all the while, awaiting her transformation.
Nancy M. Hill © 25 February 2002
{Accidental Strangers}{Beyond
the Bastion} {Disguises}
{[As a gentle whisper…]} { Hunger}
{top of page}
A crowded room,
You,
Accidentally waiting,
Out of place.
There at the enticements of your pretty-boy escorts:
Oedipally complicated mothers' sons who lavished
Their attentions.
A forgotten decade,
Bottom-of-a-bottle explorations,
Across the rim of a glass,
Salt tears biting.
November came:
You flew away to Germany:
Playing wife to your mental case soldier husband.
A card at Christmas—no return address.
You had never wanted to be found to begin with.
Nancy Hill © January 2002
{Chrysalis}{Beyond
the Bastion} {Disguises}
{[As a gentle whisper…]} { Hunger}
{top of page}
Fortressed and alone, drifting into
Passages furbished by safeness. . .
asylum for
The within and the without.
Ever wary of even one infinitesimal
Push to detect the depths,
We talk in superfluities and trivialities.
No one breaches the bastion. . .
No trespass into the vexed soul
Encompassed by a defending heart. . .
Just as wedding bands
Enclose more than mere fingers.
A singular resplendent night of the soul,
Rent and lacerated
As flesh torn by falcons,
Raised the bastion. . .
Like rocks,
Piled vast—innumerable as sands duned by sea winds;
Impervious to questors, virtuous or no,
In the bastion
We never realize 'tis aloneness inside of this stillness we have become.
Two walls fronting,
The safe ones never embracing
The sameness of the other:
They will collapse into themselves like
Ocean waves cresting,
Then crashing to the sea floor
Taking all inside itself.
Nancy Hill © August 1998
{Chrysalis}{Accidental Strangers}
{Disguises}
{[As a gentle whisper…]} { Hunger}
{top of page}
Counterfeit dreams slashed the throat of a crimson-lipped whore.
Sticky, briny blood clung to her white throat flesh like molasses
Sweetly clinging to a child's fingers as he eats his mother's Sunday morning
pancakes.
Confessions bought her only an incurable ache in her soul,
And a bloody white throat after Mass.
The air breathed heavily with sex and death as the rain
unwittingly washed away her sins.
Nancy Hill © August 1983
{Chrysalis}{Accidental Strangers}
{Beyond the Bastion}
{[As a gentle whisper…]} { Hunger}
{top of page}
As a gentle whisper,
I come from the
night,
a
murmur on your skin,
a
wisp across each breast.
Soft as a breeze
I arise in your
mind,
dreams,
born of want,
sustained
by unrelenting
passions
feeding the reflection
…and more dreams.
Nancy Hill © 3 July 2001
{Chrysalis}{Accidental Strangers}
{Beyond the Bastion}
{Disguises}
{ Hunger} {top of page}
I hunger in silent, prowling cravings for your mouth, your voice
In this ancient night of moonless shadow dreams
I hunger for your skin, hot and sleek and dark.
No sound distracts my cravings, no intruder obstructs my quest.
Like a pacing, hungering wolf,
Only in devouring you will I be sated,
Released from this ache of the moon-empty hunting night.
N. M. Hill ©August 2001
{Chrysalis}{Accidental Strangers}
{Beyond the Bastion}
{Disguises}
{[As a gentle whisper…]} {top
of page}