✷
I have been here longer than you have drawn breath.
There is a hollow in my core,
the cavern of age, a sanctuary for generations of wrens,
jays, owls, opossums, racoons with their black gloved hands.
I collect rainwater. I brew delicate decoctions to heal the world.
The draping moss is my prophet’s robe.
The songbirds are my acolytes.
My feet rest on the heads of men and women
who dreamed of outlasting me.
My touch returns their tender bones to dust.
I breathe in death. I exhale life.
I stand in this ever-widening floodplain
to remind you of these earthly things.
I am waiting.
I am a living tomb.
There is a hollow in my core,
the cavern of age, a sanctuary for generations of wrens,
jays, owls, opossums, racoons with their black gloved hands.
I collect rainwater. I brew delicate decoctions to heal the world.
The draping moss is my prophet’s robe.
The songbirds are my acolytes.
My feet rest on the heads of men and women
who dreamed of outlasting me.
My touch returns their tender bones to dust.
I breathe in death. I exhale life.
I stand in this ever-widening floodplain
to remind you of these earthly things.
I am waiting.
I am a living tomb.
✷
Emma Galloway Stephens is a neurodivergent poet and professor from the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in The Windhover, Thimble Literary Magazine, Red Branch Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Door is a Jar Literary Magazine, and many other publications. You can read more at egstephenspoetry.com.
