Georgia Song
written by: Amanda Needham
I can hear your song rising up from the fields like a wail.
Hymns appear in scythe marks on the dirt driveway every full moon;
devotionals that make me bend, cower, and sweat until I believe.
A revival from your barley pulpit, calling me to worship and get lost to the world.
Take baptism in the rains; hoping the ground will open like an ever-yawning mouth and give me my grave beside yours.
‘No, I have a use for you’ the storm laughs, and how it sounds like you.
When you move I can see the where they cut you apart, the place they slit you open.
I can still smell the rope around your wrists, the gaps in skin where the dogs ran you down.
You are heavy, rotten, mine.
Oh, I would press my lips to those putrid wounds and kiss if it would resurrect you.
There are nights you are outside my window, blue in the porch light and beckoning to meet you in the fields.
But you are still there, my love,
strung up on the pike,
scaring nothing away but other lovers.
I prefer you even now: quartz white, gravid and overripe with your mouth like a bruise and pentagrams around an open grave.
They are a cryptograph to be solved.
But now I see the answer
I have read the symbols,
and I will bring you back.
- Spotlight On Writers – Amanda Needham - December 15, 2018
- Syosset, NY. October 17, 2002 - October 19, 2018
- Mountain Tales - November 11, 2017
