Zayra Yves: Poetry

I am SHE

I am the red throne of Kali, the orange flames of Sekhmet. The dancing diva of Durga come to call your spirit back into your body Rise up your tired bones to move, sway, rock in the halls of perception.

I am here in the ceremony of removing obstacles from the caves of memory. I am Vulture Crone. I am Maat. I am the midwife birthing you into ferocious truth, progressive intuition and powerful right action.

I am the lioness licking salt from the salted state of your flesh; of the wounds that you need to heal. I am here as your sixth sense. As the doorway of discovery to awaken you to the journey you came here for; to awaken you to universal balance.

I am the High Priestess, Luna of the moon. I am Nephthys.

I open the gateway to submarine gardens. Listen to the secrets of the butterfly starfish and embrace all people. Embrace your sister, your children, your ex’s and step families too. I am here to encourage you to make amends and let go permanently the grievances you hold.

I am the wisdom of Sophia, the strength of Athena, the gates of hell.

You are the shape shifting vertigo of bodies, of many life times. You are the migration of millions. You are the sorrow of the seas, the sands of change, the receptacle of all life and the willingness to do it again. I am here inside of the image you have of yourself.

Look closely:

I am Radha, Laksmi, Hathor, Isis, Venus and Mary Magdelaine.

I am the elements of absolute love that rise up from your hips and speak from the heart of truth. This is not the idolatry of self, neither the desecration of self. You are not here to cherish the false but to awaken beyond the illusion you previously chased and sacrificed for.

I am the Mother of Heaven, the flowing inspiration of Sarasvati.

I am come to you as the whispering winds of change, as living chaos, summoning the fates, summoning your destiny to rise up and greet you in the mirror. Rise up and know yourself by heart. Ask the stranger you have become to be a stranger no more. Express the love you have hidden, free the hostage of yourself in the unseen, unheard, captive in unfullfillment.

Welcome yourself home. Honor the love you feel. I am SHE. I am you. You are me. Love yourself. Embrace me.

copyright 2006 by Zayra Yves

BORN FROM HEAVEN

I plucked you out of a star field
gave my salt water body to you
and let you enter me.

Cupping you as a small shell
skull attached to a mere tail
spooling around love's finger,

I held you where water is mute
where it is shallow contained
but full of life.

And, you slumbered as a ship tossing
in movements of daily murmurs,
listening to notes of my heart...

consoling yourself in smallness
with a little foot not knowing itself
or the ordinary people waiting

to meet you, now drunk on flowers
their throats parched from singing,
from contemplating your face.

After you arrived we envied your lips
crowned you nocturne and we loved
kissing your nose.

So, you see how you must survive
the municipal and the harsh;
those who chisel at the sun...

because I carried your light in me
even before we agreed to share
this cup of body.

copyright by Zayra Yves 2006

CROWNED COMPASSION

I rise on this plateau from another world,
from the world beyond, from the roots of virtue
and noble intention. I rise from a prayer
part land, part stone, part divine imagination and clay.

I am carved from the human life here in this world,
from hands that have known sorrow, innocence, loss,
from hands that have known drunkenness and love lust.

I am formed simultaneous as all movement, motion, aware:
born as a Bodhisattva, as a friend, as the Eternal Mother,
as embodiment of attributes both strong and slender.

I grow from the roots of non-attachment as Bodhicitta,
as the relief from torment and suffering I grow up
out of the dirt, mud, rock toward the sun, rain, sky.

I evolve as porcelain insight, blue as the universe
unfolding brilliant white, glowing constellation
star by star, blossoming consciousness petal by petal,
crystal as the lotus from the pure land I emerge.

copyright 2006 by Zayra Yves

NO SUCH THING AS "I" IN THE UNIVERSE

Well, not exactly.

In the beginning
I peer into the heart
of the Sun.

You roll it
in the palm of your hand
as a glass stone;
not white, but red
and gold.

You point to the bright spot:
there is a hole
in the sky
and the sun is so thirsty
it drinks our skin.

But nobody takes it seriously
this idea we are born
from the stars.

I need the fire myth
of lion colored solar flares,
disturbing the uncommitted,
as much as you do.

Let the fire
burn straight into me,
magnetic in the naked
daylight.

We are sure of nothing
and hope for everything
together in the gallery
of the sun.

You won't say why,
except your religion is the cosmos,
and language echoes incandescent.

So, we vanish
into the ultraviolet eye of love
and embrace the sky.

copyright 2007 by Zayra Yves

DROWNED CATHEDRAL

At last we are free
from the rock
we had chained our love to.

We swim empty
between there and somewhere

under the transparent sky
no longer bound
by the laments of dying.

We are flesh that is torn
beyond the language of lyrics

past the art of mystery
and into the caves of the heart
as light is turned inside out.

We are the miracle that exists
in ten thousand grains of sand

in the seaweed of saints
and lovers submerged
covered in barnacles.

In a drowned cathedral
we have found each other again
curled in the shell of life.

copyright 2007 by Zayra Yves

IRREGULAR HEART BEATS

I am searching the dictionary
for the words to describe how
the world has shifted its axis
since you left.

All I am finding are strange words
that cling together by virtue
of their order.

There is nothing to describe
the color of a vanishing heart
or the fragrance of hope.

I remember when you asked
me to wait. I am waiting.

I close the dictionary to light a candle.
The wick burns brightest toward the end.

I close the window. In the street
a saxophone player leans against the wall.
His music reverberates of others
who came before him.

Life is a series of questions –
a parade of irregular heart beats
waiting for love to answer.

copyright 2007 by Zayra Yves

BY NOW THE LIGHT HAS FADED

The holy rage has gone down
with the sun of anger
and the story of enlightenment
is writing your name
through a sliver of moon,
so in this moment of reflection
the ashes of burnt hearts
are carried by the wind
to settle in the deep waters
of the unborn.

copyright 2007 by Zayra Yves

FAITH

I don't want to forget your name
yet, easy as the new wind
the first syllable billows into air
lost in the repetition
of water.

Already I wish to fly
on the single sound of you
that escapes me
before it dives into a hush
and sinks in the sea
of ruins.

copyright 2007 by Zayra Yves

ABLUTIONS

I need you like the rain
to fall into the shrine
of my chest where my heart
sits in flames, burning
from too much of this
world, too much of this
pain, burning with desire
to feel the flowers
of love bloom again.

copyright 2006 by Zayra Yves

NOT WAITING

I am not waiting for the world to love me back.

Yeah, I know I have heard about that idiot compassion
and how not to love too much or be a burning saint.

It is true that skulls hang from roofs, bones dance
in the streets; people shoplift, beg and grow moss.

The news is crazy with itself. It foams at the mouth
wears the best clothes; is unrepentant for all the darkness.

It is rumored that the succulent and juicy are for sale
sort of like a fruit no one seems to get enough of.

And, even though everyone keeps saying this is IT,
the end of everything, the end of the world;

that we should scrape, bite and chain smoke…
somehow I believe that even a star killed by clichés

recovers its light in the blank void of somewhere.
It sort of reminds me of where I am going

even though I only vaguely remember that place,
sort of sovereign but unsolved and unnamed

like lips pressed to lips when we turn silent
to be near the scent of loving one another.

Maybe sometimes we just don’t know how to love
in the absence, in the moment, in return…

Copyright by Zayra Yves 2008
All Rights Reserved

The Blurred Version

Drained of color the night rises to greet me
thirsty for our song.

The line is drawn
and a faded boat has left the shore.

I take apart the last time
we were in each another’s arms –

try to reassemble the softness in my fingers:
silk, flowers and rosaries.

I stare into the fog
looking for your shape to return
if nowhere else except in my soul.

In that world, I held your skin so close to mine
there is a mark, a stain, a scar…

as I continue to hold you
between that dying and this death

in a transfusion of silence
that not even the sound of water can break.

In a song of blind love
a bird cannot camouflage the heart

so, I gather our shadows and prepare myself
for a moment that will never come.

Copyright 2008 by Zayra Yves

Red Clay

I am your first mother.

Before history erased me
faded into stone pigment and wood
circled with shells and dog teeth
mounted by an elongated face
and round body to the center
of your existence
somewhere south of the equator
where my ancestors
still chant my name on the edge
of a hundred winds
while the trees translate my song
your soul tips over
split off from the movement
of rivers in a modern episode
where magic is sudden as the belief
that everything beyond yourself
expands into the miracle of possibility
and pre-history.

Listen to me,
I am your first mother.

Copyright 2008 by Zayra Yves

UNFINISHED & UNTANGLED

I want to be unfinished. I like myself this way.

I like the sound of my voice speaking from a lopsided heart

like a mystic song played softly in the early mornings

off the fisherman’s coast

or maybe like some melancholy drama

carving its name into a wall -

whatever it is, this is the moment I want to be.

I want to be ineffable sweetness

untangled and unraveled and written by a poet

smooth as a wish that floats off the page

and kisses you in public (right here in front of everyone)

and crowns you with love and throws flowers at you.

I just want to be the old habits that fall away

I want to be like the garments of pain

that have been worn for too long -

they are ragged from wandering in the night

they are torn from ghosts

so they fall away.

They can’t cling to who I am anymore.

After all those years of waiting, after all those tears

after all that judgment, all that criticism,

all that finger pointing

and the loneliness (god the loneliness),

I just want to be unfinished, untamed and untangled.

I want to sway dance and move through the world

marvelously naked.

Copyright by Zayra Yves 2008
All Rights Reserved

A Lost Cry

No hopes were born tonight
but I don't think we meant to bury
our hearts.

Perhaps when neither I, you
or the earth exists
new stars will be born.

They will chant slowly
pulling our drowned city from the sea –

uncover secrets, blood impulses,
listen for fragments of love
and our delicate catastrophes
lost in trampled songs.

Those stars will cut our names from stones
release our voices to the wind

uproot our small bodies
bent and rusted to the core
incapable as shells of a single word

after waves of emptiness...

we will stir
from the place where no one understands
or has memory

suddenly our eyes will open
bright as new suns.

copyright 2008 by Zayra Yves

A Lover and the Echo

You know who you are,
I don't need to write your name at the top of this poem.

You rest close to the bone
the same as a wound that will not heal.

I realize I should not speak of these things
anymore:

tumultuous, wild, tragic, sweet and
over too soon.

Or think of how we sold our song
with sandalwood in an open market

It is time I give up the nine stars
that fell from your eyes

onto your collarbone, down to your torso
cutting into my hips

as they tried to catch one another
before they disappeared in the darkness.

I imagine they still lay awake
stare up at the window wondering

if we remember their fire
or if we will ever return

to set them free of this earthy exile
banished and belonging to no one.

I hear the roll of the tongue
as they cry out on a moonless night

holding the skull of our love
that refuses to be a corpse.


copyright 2008 by Zayra Yves

Color Me Pomegranate and Retrograde Motion are a pair....

The poems listed below are all published in "Color Me Pomegranate" and can be purchased through Lulu. The copyright to the poems belongs to the author, please do not copy without permission.

Warning: Color Me Pomegranate is not always pretty, so tread carefully through these poems.

*

Firefly

The alligators moved in our dreams
all through the night
and we gave our blood to the mosquitoes
in their demand for charity -
the keepers of secrets.

Though I confess
it was the promise of fire
painted like Mayan stars on the inside of a jar
that kept me holding
my love for you
all through the black nights
of tropical bayous.

I should have known
that what is caught and kept
dies a slow death
the same as a cigarette
smoked alone in the night.

- zayra yves


*

My First Word

They say my first word was "light"
but I don't remember it
since reaching into that warmth
has never been easy for me.

My dreams are a cluster of electricity
that do not spiral,
gather in a painting or borrow comforting sounds
any more than they chase off 
a dark night
or eliminate shadows in the hall.

It doesn't matter.  Nothing is singled out
because it is all so short anyway
before we know it
that is, before I know it,
what I want to write about the light
is irrelevant.

- zayra yves

*

After a Moonless Night

I am the same witch from 2,000 years ago.

Even a good home with magpies, children and pathetic noon
won't change what I carry
or my sympathy for cycles and the moon.

I am a woman of disillusion,
madness and passion.

No one is immune to my brazen infiltration.
I become a lover to whomever I choose.

Don't think you will burn me in this century.  
I found fools in Gods and hero's in bums
so I can endure the measure of a timeless flame.

Sometimes love is bittersweet right in the center
of what is unexpected
and I live for the unpredictable.

I am a woman of farewells, setting suns
and the decline
but I relax into forgiveness and
the kind.

Never mind the zombie people
crying for more applause -
I am not going to be guilty and low to the ground.

Truthfully, my heart beats a little faster
after a moonless night
and if you are near enough to hear it,
I might love you.

- zayra yves

*

Athena in a real woman’s body 

enters the room
twenty minutes into the plot line
and demands an honest face
rather than astonished imagination
or peaceful indifference
and she expects
you to use the tools she gave you
to win the war
between self-pity and transcendence.

- zayra yves


*

Cutting Out Your Name

I decide to remove the tattoo of you
from my insides.

I discover you have marked every vessel
of my insatiable heart
so nothing within my heart can survive
this slaughter.

Swift as an executioner,
I slice it out. 

Without mercy, it bleeds to death.

I walk down the street
and everyone can see right through me
as I pretend to live without you.

- zayra yves

*

Break, Blow and Crash

It is true I knew a sunflower
who blew through town
in red shoes
and loved to lift her skirt
real high
in a devil-may-care
sort of girlish way.

She was not on the narrow road
or into the best men
she just walked sideways
a little
in thigh high panty hose
while the smoke rose
gold and wispy around her crown
like a testament
to the desert
gone mute by a heart of flames
stoned to death.

All she wanted
were the pink apple daydreams
sweet and adolescent
until hell's hours
undressed her terrors
down to ash
like someone kissed
by madness.

- zayra yves


*

Medusa is My Neighbor 

She has wild snake hair
full of hiss and snarls

just like you imagine
just like you have been told.

Her face is tight
and she chain smokes.

Our eyes meet
and no one turns to stone.

- zayra yves


*

A Swallowed Shipwreck

In all of the poems about water,
I cannot find you:

sea of remembering
liquid redemption

except where the shore is washed away
and death floats into death

as it dissolves my heart into sand
my soul is broken on the reef

inseparable from a checkered moon
in the shadow of what is taken

as our love is torn apart
limb by limb

and the sea consumes our story
of two lovers that drown in what cannot be

as it fills my lungs inch by inch
in the silence of cruelty.

- zayra yves


*

Refugees

My words are detained at borders
scattered under fences,
hidden in the back of trucks
exiled in places beyond my reach,
captured and sold in cages
given up for lost in the back alley.

If you find them
tell them I have not forgotten their names
and it is okay to return home.

You will know them by their scars -
how they trade bones for songs
and collect flames that fill glass jars.

You will see that they dress themselves
in pomegranate and ash -
sometimes buried in the prisons
or a mass grave.

I have too many of them
and I cannot follow them in wounded streets
so when they ask
where I am,
or if you have seen me,
tell them I am the homeless woman
talking to herself on the curb.

- zayra yves


*

 

Tall Trees

Tall trees were falling the day my spirit cried out.

I heard the trees scream from my soul. 
I was down on my knees, struck silent. 
I heard your voice as an echo in the forest,
speaking to me of the heartless, 
of killing,
of asking me to reconsider the sharp edge that scars
that beheads, ends a nine hundred year cycle.

I was a leaf in the wind
that blew in the sway of branch,
to land on the bottom.

Where I found myself cut down to size
as a woman fallen -
my heart blown out.

I discovered mice communicate with their eyes
and violin spiders weave countless webs,
so I let them crawl with beetles in my hair. 

I imagined I might die in the dirt.
I might not ever feel the roots of my feet
or the water in the lines of my life.

Then your ghost was before me with eyes of light
as you emerged from the clouds.  

I became the silence of birds as they paused,
as they had one day long ago
when we were children in the forest
(crossed our hearts, hoped to die)
playing at love in a cathedral of trees.
  
We were naked as butterflies.

Now I feel your presence
as I wait for the passage of death,

of voices that haunt
and claw deep into the red clay of this earth,
of my womb.

In a trance I feel your hand on my side
as you say:

"Everyone has an opinion about you.
They think you are dead or lifeless,
only meant for their pleasure and excitement.”  

But I have witnessed the roots in your heart,
shared your pain and the wine from your table.

I know you are alive with an eternal love inside."

So, if you will not resurrect to stand beside me,
then let me be where you are.

Let me be the wind as it translates:
no despair, do not retaliate.

Let me cradle you in this deep forest
until you rise again
as Mother, as Friend, as One

- zayra yves


*

Alone


Loneliness, I have taken your name.
I have crowned you with mine
though there are deeper emotions than you.
Tonight I will live with this one name,
invite you to dinner and sleep with you.
Not because you have nice hands
or offer a taste of earthiness in darkness
but simply because the essence of being alone
is like knowing myself for the first time
as if the real me has been naked all along
stranded in the fog.

- zayra yves

*

so, she transforms herself

into the song of a flamenco guitar
into the spiral of a thirsty moon

into a wild twist of hip hop in tilt of flesh
a new temple goddess

like some sort of Marlene Dietrich
styled for a film

a celebrated Venus in torso
marble, granite and opaque watercolor

painted board, twirl of a skirt
almost as if she needs

the birth of herself naked, sleeping
on the waters, on land

in the Renaissance on a shell,
in relief century after century

rising from the sea
     this evening star:
here she goes again….changing

from the white bird of peace
to a wildflower that opens the sacred

as if her original meaning
has never been lost

- zayra yves

 

 

For the living:

sand washed prayers
to hang
on the vines of dreams
and air dry

under a mala of stars
between who we used to be
and who we are.

Let clouds disappear
into the sea -

and the moon drink
dark words from our lips
while we sleep.

copyright 2007 by Zayra Yves

Zodiac in a Jar

You tease and mock
my fascination with the heavens
and the stories that fall
from the sky.

Listen, this is how it is:

I collect stars in a jar
to remind me that we exist
auspiciously in all things
from lip to celestial.

The broken sun:
a 1,000 jagged pieces and shards
spread across the universe
to be born again.

Anyway, I have seen you
sleeping like a village poem
wrapped in colors of innocence
or sometimes posing as Apollo.

So, you won't
talk me out of gathering
the remains of a splintered sky.

I will even save room
on the bottom
for the fractured glory
of your styled cynicism.

copyright 2007 by Zayra Yves

SANCTUARY


You arrived in a dream
and left the same way.

Part of me thought it was overblown
how you might just touch me
in one minute to change life as I knew it -
walk like a flower
among the thorns of my discolored heart.

The other part of me knew
it was you

would always be you

to rise like a sweet fragrance
in the strangely lonesome field

I call "myself"

and populate it with love.

Just when I start to think it is dead
all dried up and gone
with the memories uprooted
and nothing to show for it
except a few seeds...
suddenly the selfless joy of our embrace
opens like a rose in sunlight.

Once again

I am surrounded by our flowers

in full bloom.


copyright 2007 by Zayra Yves

Untitled: Not Received

The letter outlined the 52 things I knew
I would do differently.

It started in the boat on the Zambezi
then moved to wishing we had put those twin beds
together in dark, rather than sleeping
so far apart.

I added lines for the dispute over color,
whether or not Buddha is better off dead.

Plus, I put a few double XX’s
so you can fill in the corrections to my errors
(the ones I am certain exist, I just don’t remember)
almost as if it just occurred to me to consider your opinion.

I realize seven years is a long time to wait

for this sudden awareness
for my heart as it falls from the vine;

how generous I am –
two thousand five hundred and twenty five days
too late.

I want you

I want you sweet as cinnamon, warm as butter on toast.

I want you in me soft, flickering as a candle flame.

I want you deep blue, abstract and painted in flowers.

I want you as a prayer written a thousand times, tucked in a pillow.

I want you aging, ripening on the vine, as pure as Burgundy, as Merlot.

I want you as a song five times a day in a hundred countries.

I want you as a risk, as a skydiver dives off a cliff.

I want you as a wish, as lyrical, as loyal as dolphins swim.

I want you loose as spilled milk, dripping down the sides.

I want you in me zipped as a twin, tight as a reason.

I want you midnight fragrant as African air, as distant.

I want you to play me as a harp, harmonica, flute or guitar.

I want you intoxicated dancing bare on a cloud in the rain.

I want you bright orange, hot as mouth blown glass.

I want you as a vixen, slut, love machine.

I want you as a saint, Mother Mary, Jesus, and Allah too.

I want you wrapped around my skin as a blanket on Christmas.

I want you sleeping curled under the covers faithful as a dog.

I want you aloof as a cat lounging on the windowsill.

I want you wise as an owl, royal as an eagle, free as a falcon.

I want you laughing, bubbling over, sparkling as champagne.

I want you as a mystery, a story, as someone I may have imagined.

I want you dressed, undressed, clothes over the chair, on the floor.

I want your name revealed in my world as someone eternal.

I want you naked, raw, exposed as an oyster on the half shell.

I want you to crawl out of my dreams to join me.

I want you here, now.

First Day of Summer

At Capistrano and Highway 1
I am about sixty seconds away
from fourth gear

his hand touches my knee
slides my dress
up past the red light

I drive it over fifty-five
as he fingers the underwear line
pulls the lace aside
I open the juice of summer heat
like some kind of pear
some sort of whorish peach
spilling in his open hand.

The Night Bird’s Last Tear

All year she gathered things that bind,
collected thorn and toad memories

field to field in every angle of light
only to find some questions do not answer.

She went as far as the horizon -
beyond departures, the plague and sunspots

not in hopes of carnations and prisms
not in search of prayers and the sacred

just for thin last words and a few flights
in the dark toward a crystal heart.

In the morning, silence gave her something
too small for a name. She accepted

a tender exile and let the habit of looking
for herself drop on the shore broken

into a million pieces of nameless grace
by turns of twilight the mouth of a small earth

and she opened to taste the stars,
that exhausted heaven gone drowsy on her lips

now a smooth brightness transparent
between her limbs and ribs as night dissolves

in the color of her eyes like ten thousand
moons of naked silence.

Love’s Sanctuary….

You arrived in a dream
and left the same way.

Part of me thought it was overblown
how you might just touch me
in one minute to change life as I knew it
and walk like a flower
among the thorns of my discolored heart.

The other part of me knew
it was you

would always be you

to rise like a sweet fragrance
in the strangely lonesome field
I call “myself”
and populate it with love.

Just when I start to think it is dead
all dried up and gone
with the memories uprooted
and nothing to show for it
except a few seeds…

suddenly the selfless joy of our embrace
opens like a rose in sunlight.

Once again

I am surrounded by our flowers
in full bloom.

Why I am Not Afraid of the Dark

I.

I offer thanks to the darkness
dressed in a spectacle
of cruel mysticism.

For without the black hearts,
there are no flowers of light.

II.

Praise for Mapplethorpe's lillies
and celebrations of impotence
choked around scrotums
and confirmations
of barbed wire.

He would not turn away from
pierced tongues
of borrowed debauchery
and circumstance.

III.

Let them talk of cypress
and steal diamonds—

The black hole of a face
pretends to suck infinity,
propagate the myth
of madness.

Let them have a thin smile
of satisfaction—

It is hip to be a victim
and practiced in the art
of disturbing.

IV.

When this cacophony
of the overly anxious
dies down...

it is the carnival of the sun
with sweet perfume
and solar flares,

not the trivia of slide shows,
that burns heaviness
from the mind.

V.

Angels appear—
turn shadows inside out.

And, who knows what
is reflected by the rays
bounced off darkness

in smooth radiance,
like some beauty
that cannot be captured?

VI.

In a vortex where hearts join
and eclipse one another
through portents of mystery,

darkness is a canvas
for brilliance and prisms
that favour stars.

I offer thanks to the light—
listen as the heavens open,
and the stones cry out.