LIFE Poem: Voicing the Unfading, by Gerburg Garmann

Ah, friend, let me speak of the unfading, the truth women carry, not as prophecy, but as witness, bone-deep and soul-worn.

I

If women were to speak, not of what might be, but of what is, they would tell you this: the body, isn’t a still pond. It’s a restless grammar, a syntax turned and twisted thrice, daily wrought, like iron in the fire. Not silk, but fleshy revolutions, held by mercury skin.

In those lucid fissures, where the mind flickers against the encroaching night, we seek starlight’s sutures, moon-silk weaving the fractured gaps. We know the neural pathways, those ancient quilts, forever needing mending:

Re-wiring, re-routing, resisting against the heart’s static. Through the held breath, and its release. This is the silent labor of survival, our holy unyielding task, the women’s work.

II

Alas, the fevered room, where dim candles bloom, those toxic flowers in power’s thicket. We are dragged down, willingly or not, into their cosmic un-naming’s undertow. But we claw our way back, through language’s hollow spirals, past jellyfish, bell-like, their translucent skins bearing the sea’s weight, water’s un-hardened truth. Our syntax, a defiant circle, thrice blessed.

People ask us for an ode to time’s passages? Really? That’s like catching smoke in a butterfly net, or willing the monstrous to collapse, self-devour. Yet, we try, we always try. We pluck the burrs, those spidery letters from the soul’s attic, a necessary violence against isolation’s thorns.

III

The fractured mirror reflects multiplicity, not self; it’s self-evident. Cassandra’s echo, a truth unwanted. Semele, god-fire consumed, by surprise. Juliet, trapped, love’s amplified tragedy. A mirror releases women, always women, their rich stories spilling out like water from a breached dam before it is fixed again.

Yet, Scheherazade, who spun space from absence, escaped the certainty of ever-night. The scent of myrrh, a lingering promise, healing spun from the void with its own laws of renewal. Look over here: on this moss-covered stone, the earth is cool beneath us, the night’s a living breath. And there, a group of phosphorescent mushrooms: a warm bloom, a valiant light in the deepening darkness.

Not all brilliance is extinguished, no, not ever. We persist, if only as doves on borrowed branches, we bloom, we shine, we are.

We are the unfading.