The Open Heart.

The Open Heart.

War, in a house or in a battle field
Closes the heart and seals away our deepest self.
Heroes find the path to where (even in the face
Of pain and terror,)
They allow the heart to reveal itself to the world
And get up,

And dance
When the piper plays
And the drums beat.

We were born to be wild things
Exploring the world, discovering through mistakes
Not being beaten down by them.
We laughed and ran through fields as children
But as adults we close the doors and windows
To keep out the echoes of that laughter
From our shrunken worlds.

The open heart bears pain
It suffers, it aches.
It also is the door to joy.
It is the seed by which love blossoms,
It is the perfect place
For people to shed their false faces
And step into a circle
As one.

I have an open heart.
I think fear of my mortality opened those doors
And let sun into all its chambers.

It hurts,
But it also allows me to feel
Beauty at a depth I've never felt before,
Faith with a power I've never wielded before,
And hope with a persistence I never knew
Hope could ever obtain.

My open heart weeps,
My open heart laughs,
My open heart knows mercy, compassion,
Hope and love,

And I wonder why all those years
I never seem to understand
That to heal and deal with the darkness

You have to open something
To the light.

Beacon

This is a reading of the poem "Beacon"
On Youtube.

I don't know why the storm
Brought me to this angry place
So late at night.

I was standing on Hales Beach
And I recall in a blustery haze
That the world became
This foaming, roaring thing
Reaching for my ankles,
Crawling towards my soul.
The stars perforated the sky
Stained with scudding clouds
The moon
Made a holy golden path
That bobbed and rocked
Off into the horizon.

I thought back
To a sunny day where
I stood there in my bare feet
Remembering moving along the rocks
With my mother and sister
So many decades ago
Looking for star fish and little crabs.

And in a single moment
My heart reached across that barrier of time
In one breath
And I knew mother was gone,
And gone forever.
The ache in my heart
Reached through my feet
And disturbed the bubbling sand crabs below.

And I wept into the wind
Stirring into a frenzy the wild caps
Of the heartless Pacific.

It was at that moment
That Ginny handed me my soaked shoes.
I brushed them away and held her
As the sea exhaled and inhaled like lions
Roaring at the grinning face of the moon.

I wept into her wet hair
My knees buckling
The sorrow traversing all the years of my life
And pounding on the rocks of this moment.
And she braced herself against it
And held me up in the fierce winds
That traveled across the stormy caps of waves
And poured into the sinking hull of my shipwrecked heart.

We walked in the sand, the salt water
Sprinkling the air that buffeted our linked bodies.

"I miss her," I said.

Ginny laid me on a sandy blanket
And held me as the clouds collected
Around a surprised moon.
Lightening licked
At the dark waters.

The beach was deserted.
Her mouth found mine, cold and smelling of the sea
Salty with tears and ocean water
Her hands opened my soaked shirt
And she kissed my broken heart.

She drew me away from the darkness
In that water, and with her hands
Dragged me towards Life
On that sandy blanket
Under a steely sky.

She did it all,
I was a proto-human
Her Frankenstein raised from the dead
With lightening and Life Force
And we were Adam and Eve
Naked with God pointing his accusing finger
An angel driving us from the roaring Garden
And I was above her
Arched like a silver bow
The arrow poised to reach some
Penetrable, cloying place of power.

And then the sea
Rose like a wild
And windy animal
And Ginny took it all,
Her hips and pelvis reaching
Like hands
To take it all.

Later, laying on her naked chest
Slick with rain
Through my salty, wind-blurred eyes
I could see the Point Constance Light House.

Ginny looked up at me
Uncertain if she had rescued her drowning sailor
Waiting for me to take a breath
And exhale the cold water
And at that moment I saw
The beacon
That would always bring me home.

By J.M.Lamoreux