To Love - By Mara Lemanis
To Love
How do I sing
a hymn
to love
without a Father
no Great Mother
to shed love
on my torn turf
bewildered Child
You and I
craft our domain
In digital worlds
algorithms
black and white
peak and pit,
we work as
stooge and wit
and live in coffins
made of
templates
codes and scripts
We string them
into gigabytes
of global bark
skeletal chains
of palisades
and lakebeds
of sand and bone
and seed the clouds
with Pleistocene caves,
copper castles,
marble floors,
graveyards whose
cold carpets
wall away remains
of stubborn gristle
tunneled screams
from war weary
and murdered things
the extinguished and
the prematurely dead;
Come night
like succubi
we leave
our coded coffins
to touch each other
in the flesh
to warm the cold
and breathe in
sweat and scent and ooze
the happy heat
of breast and loin
our bodies speak
this kind of love;
Come day
we thread our ciphers
over separate tracks;
an error
in our program
and we jump
to crouch on
a causeway
between rival trains
You stroke a living tree
you planted long ago
and offer me a
burnished orange
glazed with dew,
I smell the rind,
the beaming peel
flares my iris
the rounded weight
cleaves like a magnet
to my hand;
I set it in a sacred close
a tent sloped with titanium sails
preserving a viand
fresh, uncoded
preserving you
and me
in love
uncoded
Mara Lemanis
Mara Lemanis
Biography:Â Mara Lemanis is a literary scholar. Her essays have been selected for 20th CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM and are included in undergraduate student textbooks in the U.S.
She has worked as an archivist for Historical Preservation and with the IRC, assisting refugees in Oakland, California.
Disclaimer: The views, opinions and positions expressed within this guest article are those of the author Mara Lemanis alone and do not represent those of the Marbella Marbella website. The accuracy, completeness and validity of any statements made within this article are not guaranteed. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to Mara Lemanis and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with the author.
