STAY

Don’t be still my beating heart.

This heart being squeezed in to funding bids, emails and

trying to articulate the magic and the margins in the English language.

This heart wondering how to serve the troubles in all their glorious colours and flavours, scared to really beat to a pulse that could break glass, and

tired of having to avoid the right kind of stillness.

The kind it needs to survive.

You know, the kind of stillness that lets you rest so deep in to mother earth

that you rest even more deeply in to god. The god that is born of soil and desert, is born of tears and longings, born of humblings and surrender. That

non-binary god who queers all the ideas we ever had of god…

Oh please don’t ‘be still my beating heart’, this heart

that hears other poets, other women, other

others singing of other others who in their naming make me

whole.

Because this heart’s liberation really fucking is wrapped up

in other others, in mycelial mysteries and

the lives of the miners behind the screen you’re probably reading this on.

And this heart’s liberation gets lost in seeing

the sea of us all. Gets stopped in the depths of that sea. Gets known in

being that sea. In being troubled by all the troubles, paralysed by all the troubles, blinded by choice, swept up by love, by loneliness, by her own otherness.

This beating heart.

This god incarnate.

Troubled, loving, broken, beautiful, pulsing…