I am born with the light into a world i can not remember dreaming.
I rise with the day inside an unfamiliar song.
I am inside a body, inside a family, inside a world.
I ask for nothing, yet receive so much, my palms overflowing with salt and flowers, ash and fruit.
An electric buzz of insects rises steep from the density of green that surrounds me and just as quickly fades away.

I am still here.

Shadows play upon leaf tops, beloveds intertwine beneath, the river charges towards and away, life is so undeniably real.
I would dissolve into an offering of smoke and song if it didn't seem so true that I am more of use in solid form, dissolving hard knots of human story into another sort of offering.

I am still here.
Even as Death catches me from behind and sweeps me across a grand dancefloor of cracked bones and burnt hair, even as i stare into the empty sockets of everyone's final lover, even as a red river runs in rivulets over my skin--that skin is warm, and holds a quickening within it.
I am still here.

Even as the solid forms of a known world dissolve in the flames of the funeral pyre, somehow I am still here.
And so are you, beloved opal keeper, feather finder, nectar seeker.
You are all around me even as you are gone you are not gone.
Even as I feel myself dissolving I am still here.

I hold a rose quartz skull in my right hand and a golden serpent in my left. The ochre of a homeland I do not posses spirals across my palms. The fire is being built, the songs are being sung, somewhere in the world there is a blade stained with innocent blood. Somewhere in the world are the hands that wield it.

Each pair of hands holds different work--mining the opals, sifting the bones, painting the ochre, ringing the bell, fanning the flame
but the hands that wield the knife--how is that work given?
How is that work placed sacred into a human vessel to wreak its havoc upon our world?

It is not for understanding.

Bring me those hands and I swear I will wash the blood from them.
I will offer myself to the resolution of this pain.
If such a thing can be called into the world, I will raise my voice in supple power to create a song of truth triumphant and justice compassionate.
I will drink the salty labor of forgiveness until the water runs clear.

And if those hands never come to me for washing, somehow I will remain.
Somehow each day will still rise through me into dreaming.