Offering in the
Name of
the Dead

Kyce Bello

I can write of the ground and the deep
hole opened in it. I can write of an old 
woman’s death, but not my own. 
What she believed, I cannot adopt or claim,
even if I agree to its limits,  which I do,
for I do not know its edges or belly, its eyelids. 
And now she has been placed, rose petals 
scattered  across her breast, inside the desert. 
The moon crosses the sky. The sun crosses the sky.
Sometimes, both cross together, as happens,
also, over the living. I thought humility 
would help me believe, but am scolded 
for credulousness.  It is a scrappy 
sort of belief,  a vagrant that returns winter 
after winter, drawing closer to the fire each time. 
I keep my truth in a bowl by the bed 
so I might begin and end each day by sampling.
Time will tell if it feeds me or leaves me hungry.
If I had animal sightings to report, I would. I would. 
Only this: In Chernobyl a faded mural of a harvest maiden
with fish, flowers, and wheat spinning 
around her upraised hands, peels off the wall. 
She bears all of history between her legs and is the ground 
in which our mothers are buried. In that same room, 
a spindly tree grows up from the floor. 
Take that persistence, that presence as your own benediction. 
I plead with myself and turn away. I am alone 
in this room, many thoughts blazoning the inner chamber, 
that is, they armor and veil me both. This is the narrow 
perch from which I witness departure. 
In which I ripen towards my own, and yours. 
This is the waiting room, in which I dedicate psalms 
to my dead. There in the earth. Call it arrival. The end.  
The fairytale split the way hair is parted 
as we search for tracks like lice against pale skin.