Sac/red

Perhaps the reason why
our mothers didn’t pray when they bled

every month
is because that blood
is already prayer, the body
manifesting miracles

can ache, too. Cleansing,
all that red giving power
to pain. Releasing.
The body never more a temple
– or a mosque –
than when she
bleeds as the moon
sheds its shadow throwing
lovesick glances at the sea,
Rippling desire into sliced
silver beams,
blinding and blueing.

The secrets in
sacred texts have always said the same thing –

messages tucked away

in wombs,
in veins,
in pronouns translated from higher frequencies,
in fingernails nibbling nervously on the scalps of children with two souls,
in the throats of little girls with bodies like graveyards.

In the same way
we might

scream our prayers
over the sound of our neighbours’

bodies shaking with the salt of migration,
in the same way we might

carry our prayers

as we hold onto a life

we don’t know how to save,
in the same way we might

whisper our prayers
deep between diaphragm and intestines so no one else hears them,

our mothers bled, their bodies
becoming One with
life and death,
creation itself

trembling.

And the secret has always stayed the same –
How sometimes

the most Sacred of us

scare the rest of us

senseless.