Earthspun

Home is held in a dark place, a dank place,
beneath the musted plates of glass where, once,
I curled and crept into the rusting lungs of some cabbagepatch god.
Here, words are trapped, tapped into the husks
of my fingernails, the mouldering beds of marrow.

In the silence, I have learned to turn and face the wall;
to let the earth knot and clot in the back of my throat.
My tongue is swollen to a bulb: a stopped geranium that’s fixed to falter,
enthralled by the depths at which I can slumber without
going under. In this silence, I have learned to burn

and breathe beneath my breadth. O the beauty of usage!
I will weight in this angle of repose till I am fully gorged.
And then, when I seed and sleep, my bones will grow and strike their maps
of rot and roots below, to a Mother who is all glut, all mouth.
I will be sown - a row of milk teeth and raw kidney stones –
into the gut of the undergrowth.

I am already half unstrung, and plumped for hunger.

Just a little longer –
till I am gone to the ground, till I am sleeping sound
amidst the cracked vowels of the earthspun song.

Just a little longer
till I truly belong.

* * *

Alternative title: Sowing Stones in Glass Houses

More mythology poems are coming soon, I promise! But first, this: my entry for Lit-Community's contest, of which the theme is 'belonging'.

There are several references here to Plath's poem Who, which is the first in the Poem for a Birthday sequence (on which this is also based).