Now she will not stop because I have failed and I can see the towers burning from here. She is my Kali, my destroyer goddess. The very air burns with her fury. They should have never turned their affections from her. Her rage has become tangible; I can breathe it in, taste it on my tongue. It is as bitter as ash that falls to the ground in a terrible flurry of torched flesh and cinder. She is my cinder goddess.
I hesitate. I stand on this shore frozen in my own dramatic inertia torn between my urge to return to the sea and to rush into her arms. Her terrible arms, that hold many swords and many severed heads. Her victims stare with slackened maws gaping at her bloodied hands holding all their pasts and futures like a crushing vice. She was their mother, their lover, and now she will be their destruction.
They should never have turned from her. Never have forgotten her awful beauty. They had once cowered in temples filled with lilies and chrysanthemums and the smoke of a thousand perfumed pyres; they had scraped their knees and soaked blood into her sacred ground. Her womb grew heavy with their seed and she rebirthed their world a thousand times; she fed the world with her own flesh, turned it, brought the sun to them, coaxed the crops from the ground, stood the moon still and filled the rivers with fish and bounty.
But they turned from her, they tore down her temple stone by stone and salted the earth with their ungrateful tears. One by one they forgot her silken skin and delicate feet. They lifted her veil of hair and toppled her idol from the center of every city. They grew indulgent and fat on their own importance. They forgot her. They forgot the horrible truth of her existence; her ability to turn the rain to acid with her kiss, the sharpened cruelty of her smile, her eyes burning since before the time of ancient gods, her hand upon every heart ever born into this world or the next.
I have been her lover for a thousand of a thousand years. I have lain in her many arms when the world was still. When the air dare not touch her for fear of its own death, I would slide my hands down her skin to the hum of her eternal songs. She would lay her swords aside to cradle me against her breast. I bore the stars for her to claim her love and laid kisses upon her brow to calm her troubled sleep. I folded myself to her chest and listened to the many heartbeats of the dieing dreams of a universe of crumbling civilizations. I ran my fingers in the miles of her flowing hair and drew her to me. I swore my eternal adoration and meant every word I uttered.
But now I hesitate on this endless shore because I know I have already failed. She slipped from me as they forgot her dark divinity; as they forgot just how much they needed her. I could not hold her as her rage grew no matter how hard I tried to soothe her with my gentle caresses. They have robbed me of her love. She will burn the world clean now with all the fire in her belly. The tremors of her wrath will be felt in the space in between every quivering sob and I will never lay in her arms again. She is destruction. My lover, she is destruction. And they will pay with flame and flesh and pain and suffering for ever being so bold and arrogant as to turn their backs on her terror and beauty. They have become the designers of their own deaths and the catalysts of my eternal loneliness and sorrow.
I turn away and hesitate as the towers burn down around me and the screams fill my ears across this sea of my great and terrible lost love. I lay my head in my hands and I begin to weep. I think that I shall never stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment