After Loving

By Ethna McKiernan

We have no need of speech.

The spirit lives in the skin,

speaks from the pulse
in the neck,

glows from finger bones

like a private fire.

Bodies lose their plurality here.

Now we become the smallest atom,

incapable of breakage.

Anything we were fades

to another vision, a past life.

Again and again your face turns to me,

singing shut the distances.

It is more beautiful

than the naked moon.

I will not leave in the morning.

Source: Caravan by Ethna McKiernan (Midwest Villages & Voices, Minneapolis and The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1989).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Never Say It Is Not God
• Charis
• Cherish
• Just Now and Then
• It Happens All the Time in Heaven
• Getting It Right
• Dew[y]-Kissed

Image: Photographer unknown.