THIS SELF-BORN SUN AND EVERYTHING BENEATH HER 

by Samara Cole Doyon

(After Li-Young Lee’s “This Room and Everything in It”)

Now that we have become the earth again

or pagans or pilgrims (uncolonized)

in the purest sense of the word—traveling

back to that space where we are

soil broken by root-reach

by rivers of fragile tendril fingers;

Where we are gratefully infiltrated,

heartbeat pulling heartbeat,

brain yielding to body again,

yielding to the need to yield–

fold, ripple like the river of shadow bands

now covering us all;

Yielding to the need to worship source,

beginning, ending, all—

all as in the endless

inky ocean which

the sky has now become,

I can admit (again) the possibility of prophecy—

of speaking in tongues of devils

or angels or women or non-men

or unends or rivers or corona

Of becoming again a source,

a tunnel, a channel.

Just as this sun

(a silver flaming rim

reverse crowning)

becomes a channel both for itself

and for the darkness

which consumes us all as we praise her,

praise them, praise all

The unformed syllables dropping

silently from my lips now

reminding me of something

something about the tree roots

and the river and the soil

This fading dream bleeding out softly

through the stillness of the mid-day night

this breath a frail puff of air trapped

still within my chest

It was something about birth;

It was something

about death.