TERRA MATER

by catherine cullen

I receive the dead

floating downstream

bird-scattered

preserved in concrete chambers

sky ash from terrible ovens –

fragments or whole

unbury the dead

in your heart –

inter them to me

unbury the fragments

now geese, now stones

fluttering, homegrown ore

unbury tenderness

for a world that seemed

wrong, to wrong you

unbury the blaze,

the juice frightened

underground

unbury the colors

planes, lines

all vibrating –

awaiting assignment

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Catherine Cullen imagines humans on a continuum with the natural world -- its wonders, terrors and mortality always near. A multi-disciplinary artist, her writings on art + film have been published in Hyperallergic and Afterimage. She lives on a bird migration flyway in Staten Island, NY.