I Do Not Wish to Gentle the Beast

A Sunday Poem

Hello friends,

I have been thinking of death and birds of late, thanks to the “end of Life doula, baby bird carer”

Chloe Hope

(everyone go subscribe right away if you want to be immersed in beautiful, dark, hopeful prose- and who here doesn’t??), and this poem rose up from wherever poems arise.

Thank you to everyone here for reading, for sharing when you feel moved to, for recommending, for restacking, for sitting around my fire for a bit. There are so many bright circles to join in this world, and I’m delighted to be warming our hands together around this one.

Kendall

I do not wish to gentle the beast.

…

Give me a God who dwells in feather and bone,

who knows what it is to eat and be eaten,

who understands wholeness

not just through the ecstatic union of lover and beloved

but perhaps more intimately

through the submission

of a field mouse to the sharp surprise of talons,

soft belly yielding to curved beak,

red ribbons of silk

wetting the dusty throat

of a goshawk

before seeping once again

into the womb of the earth.

…

I do not wish to gentle the beast.

…

You cannot tell me that nothing in Eden

had claw or fang

for tearing into flesh

before Eve

sunk her teeth into the apple.

…

I do not wish to gentle the beast.

…

Tell me instead the story of a woman who—

weary of the garden’s eternal blossoms—

fled through heaven’s gates

to lie down under a dark halo of vultures

just to listen to her own raw and ragged breath,

just to dream of a day when

her heart might finally rest,

her cooling body a feast

for the God of untamed beasts,

her skin softening into the loamy soil,

her marrow greening the leaves of clover

for a little while,

so that she might finally understand

what it is to be known

in all her fragile, fleeting beauty.

Photo by Kat Kelley on Unsplash