Posts tagged malta

In a quake she lost her head, 

but the wave of his sax, she hears

in her stomach, her model womb,

and she’s moving again.

You won’t see it

you watch her sitting, passive as ever. 

There,  just a snake

of his music you might catch 

in her languid form. 

The tremor of stone is invisible

to any but closed eyes,

you have to listen to it,

as she listens to him

playing in a tavern

fifty centuries from where she sits,

to whistling sailors who earlier laughed 

at her. Time binds her to a 

stand but wakens her stone heart

to dance and sway.

Such music! It breezes round 

her, through her, down her exposed 

breasts and throbs 

a romance. Whom has he lost 

to play like that? He goes

to a blue place where only she can reach

him, away from the din of the club, away

from our blind ears 

into her fertile arms.

When he plays he is hers

and every note he breathes is her  

breath.   When the applause rings

away he goes back to the everyday 

but she knows,  with an old woman’s 

lust, that he keeps a whisper on his lips

for her, hot on the lips of his sax.

She’s spent so long asleep in this way,

an eternity of moving limbs

while she just lay, not gazing, not thinking -

but she has felt the winds from the sea 

carve her cheekbones,  

the salt on her round thighs caressed

by children, by lovers, by passing  sailors 

who laughed at her inflated hips.

How small she is, they say, how composed.

Don’t  think she would not

disgrace herself. So many years 

of being good, it weighs on a woman.

She longs to move her arms, to stretch

out to the sky, at last to wake! 

rub her infertile stomach, her bottom, dance 

a jig around the town square and see

them stare - how she would roar her huge belly 

laugh, a fart in their faces who have been mocking her. 

Above all she wants to wrap her legs around the sailors 

and squeeze.

The itch in her shoulder will not go,

that just a little movement

would scratch - ah no! she forgets, 

she lost her right hand and must itch forever, unless

they do it for her, the sailors, the lovers, the children

she will never have, who stroke her gigantic 

breasts,  huddle in her arms,

blow their five-year old breath on her old cheeks.

Soon she will lose that as well: they plan 

to place her in walls, bind her in glass, 

stick a label in front of her - Do Not Touch,

Sleeping Goddess, circa 3000 BC, Malta.

She doesn’t feel her age, perhaps because she’s no mind

to feel it, just raw arms, raw legs, raw belly.