Full Moon September 10, 2022
November, 2018
Shattered by grief, betrayed by her body’s failure to withstand the absence of her Beloved, she lays on the ground, prostrates herself to the agony she cannot fix. Her body crazed like old fragile pottery. Hands reach from nowhere, holding her pieces together, one rests on the back of her heart.
Her head faces the center of a large golden spiral. Above her Raven hovers. The one who carries secrets between the worlds, the one who announces death. The one who remembers human folly and lives to tell the tale. Has Raven come to bless her or to gloat, to watch over her or to wait until the hands tire and pulling away, her pieces shatter into the abyss, her corpse ripe pickings. Food for Raven hatchlings, Vulture chicks.
Did Raven scratch those words along the golden spiral. Stations of the descent. Death.
Gone. Gone. Everything gone. Loneliness, Death Spirit. A litany chanted to the music of despair. All this floating in a sea of cobalt blue. The color is there, always the color. Perhaps the painter’s refusal to leave her, refusal to abandon her to the grey lens through which the woman sees the world.
The painter is not the woman, the woman is not the painter. Raven misses nothing, the
painter misses nothing. The woman feels herself being colored into existence through the painter’s eyes – this is the shade of misery, this of hope, this the contour of a black loneliness, this the color that I know lives inside of you.
Her grief portrayed, she is seen. She wonders where the painter goes when not calling her forth, magically, like holding invisible writing to the flame, she appears.
Who is she, this painter, the prostrated woman wonders, the one who tells the story knows her that deeply, yet whom she does not know. Raven’s eyes gleam with humor, he spins the wheel of time, the spiral spins, the hands let go, the woman flies apart, her pieces planting themselves in the earth. The one who paints watches the rendering, notes the placing of each piece.
“I’ve got you, she whispers tenderly, “I’ve got you.”
3 replies on “Crucifixion ”
E’O!
Thankyou Nora I can feel the words in the painting and the painting in the words.
“ I’ve got you ,she whisper’s tenderly, I’ve got you”
To be “colored into existence” the way color brought the life we know into the world… The fact of the paintings insist that Beauty is a way even when we can’t imagine a way.