Entering Spirit Realm by Sheikha A.
Her wails draw rings of fire
around my bed; in combat
a psychic makes me wash my hair
with sea, and the roots come undone
almost as if by gratis. He says her wails will
travel the trenches occupying caves underwater –
the place where seafolks dwell:
(we whisper their names
lest they come to being).
It is how it is, he enunciates the air
with a low voice. And I travel into past
tense. It must be returned to
the throat that delivers these wails; as if by
skill of the dual-tailed living deep in waters
of the kind we bathe with to release
knots tied in our strands. The whole
point about blind belief is in questioning
nothing; is in letting the power of
an aging scry heal you; is to forget you
ever caused her empty promises. Now,
the sea begins to shudder on my wet scalp,
murmuring echoes like carbonite chemicals.
The psychic tells me this is initiation; the way
for dowsing to find home; her wails tell me
clearer of inhabitation – how her body is
a field of clovers, entities of the sea take her
as theirs every night. Drops of the sea
trickle down my back the length of my hair;
whispering back my understanding of how
I was a blank slate, of how she fell onto it
like braille, while he presses a dry cloth
to my forehead, invoking the jinn to cease.
By GO69 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65084170
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