Sortilege
“The living reduce the dead to those who have lived: yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.” — John Berger
and here the dead become a part of the landscape. sling their sickles over their shoulders, after a day of work. I carry anything with me. carry you, carry me. carry the boy, jumped out of the sixth-floor glass window. carry the man lifted from the lake. carry the woman, fallen asleep. carry the sleep, carry the forgiving. when we march to the crackling fury of a steel furnace, we rob our feet blind, bandage them in sleep. when did you last feel the basin of rocks? there they repose. the dead carry your feet. every step, a handprint. the ground is pass-through, permeable. their hands meet our soles to make a step; a wave of palms, every arch, a mountain to circumvent. there is knowledge under the moss, in the mulch. the gone are collecting in their droves. driving us out of the heavy door of the future, where our tongues will syncopate to the same rhythm. arranging the string figure of the woven child. divining the tempest, the soft humming. having secret meetings with the first dew. showing the sunlight which way to go.
Why I am not a critic
Because one day I woke with an omen in the throat. Trade lines like baseball cards. Because I want to make music with the chords pressed into the red of skin not delineate their concurrent tension in the paragraph. Because the circle of my life got smaller. Got good. Grift, catapult. Because starlings murmurate in their own shape. Because hurricanes interlink into dead men walking. Because truth. Interpreter. There are old gods just behind the window. Because I don’t really understand what people mean when they say doozy. Because at the end of the day I want to say this is true, but I end up saying this is beautiful. Firework. Because I want to be beautiful, because beauty is the last thing before death. Before avarice. In our hunt for honour we went as far as suppression. Likewise, a handshake cannot be dealt with a singular body. Feeling falling. The hands intensify like moss up the tree. Because climbing for the sake of height is the reverse of falling on accident. Because these breaths equal a conversation. Because your heat in the falling light, because your heat. Lightning rod. Because in engraving the alphabet, I slipped into the early hammock of the dawn. Because the dawn. Because the fuzzy quality of atoms. Soft light. Because gravity does not know the ground, its insistence. It knows space, the inverse of a leap. Riot. Rhizome. Tangle. Knot. Knowing. Corpus. Cavern. Climate. Raincheck. Forest. Special. Because finally, the circle must hold and it did. Because finally. Because finally, within the circle, we found the music of the dawn, its long held note, and it was near silent. Deafening.
Francis de Lima is a Finnish-Brazilian poet living in London, where they recently completed their MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway. Many of their poems can be found in online literature magazines, and some have even been shortlisted for an award or two. They also work as a translator, as well as in various roles within independent theatre, film, and art projects, both in the UK and abroad.