We stood heavy like boulders in a mist,
glaring with dew and ancient fog,
on the broken floor of a woods in some wild,
we rolled like boulders thrown over a cliff,
carrying the future and plummeting, a trail
of purple stone following, the stars above
shimmering through the brown cracks
of leaves and arms and fingers embracing
each other, embracing a breeze.
Forgetting the fall, we fell and forgot
to rise.

The night was indebted to our suffering,
our cries were knives and thorns
bent on remembering, we climbed
the cascading cliff gripping to the old footholds;
pulling vines and roots and hairs and hawks
from their nests. The rubble from our descent
kept pouring off the shoulders of the precipice,
over the vertical horizon of gray caressing night,
not knowing how far was left,
uncertain of how far we had come.

Staring down through our knees we saw the pilings
of progress like tiger traps of bamboo shrapnel;
a stiff wind lifting our backs, open mouthed
to the storm we clung to nothing,
we held fast to relics before crawling like children
to the stagnant safety of being grounded, afraid
to brave the storm, forgetting how to climb,
wishing we were angels with wings to arc in flight.

Let us pick through the debris and find the dust
chipped from our flesh, compare the flat stones
to the flat moon and make tools with which
to ascend the craggy wall that we have forgotten
how to climb; behind it, in the cool dirt and rubble
lies the history of falling to our deaths
and strangely surviving.