Ellen313

ALT The Healers You can hear them moving among the ruins, hear them by their silence in the noisy crowds. You can see them, opening their little bags, opening the shrapneled hearts of strangers, crouching before the body of a child to lean down and whisper her a story, a story in which what's happening is not what's happening. They mend; they stitch; they carry. They work; they weep; they lose. And when nothing can be done among the rubble, they kneel there as the fires fall around them and they cradle the face of the dying, the life that is trying to speak to them, the life that whispers, listen, and they do. —Joseph Fasano

ALT Rain Light All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning -W. S. Merwin

ALT P I E TÀ for the mothers All his life he’d wearied her with trials, the hours he made her chase him through the temple, the times she let him walk out through the wilderness, the times he made her lift his cross, his youth. But all of it has come to this, this stillness. Waken, she wants to tell him, waken. And when she wipes his hair from off his face of changes, when she leans down to his scent of groves and soldiers, she whispers him, in soft words earth has earned her, the one prayer of a queen, a love, a mother: Let me once more carry it for you.