Bury Our Heart, by Marjorie Maddox

Fractured Heart, Karen Elias (USA). Contemporary.

Bury Our Heart

           Like every other,
this is the year of shifting
sorrows, the thin shadows of land
that slip from countries we've left
for fear or want
of finding ourselves
in a handful of dirt.

           Even in sleep,
a warm wonder of birth and loss,
there too the earth's vibrations,
the leveling of cliffs in eyes we claim.

           The soul is the land
liquid in the lines of veins
that stripe the inner atlas.
It bubbles and flows, smoothes
the rough roads, carves out
our caves of refuge,
our weeping echoes.

           Here too, they will find us
the outcasts, the fugitives,
the lost, the abandoned,
the running-for-our-lives.

           Oh homeland of sadness,
these dusty bones that could not save.
I have held in my clay hands,
the fine grains of his blood,
bold in my muddy palms;
I have held in my earthen arms
the jagged pot of his pain,
brimming and bitter.

           I have waited
for that open mouth
of the world
to lay him down.

​Marjorie Maddox

Artist, activist, and retired Pennsylvania College of Technology professor Karen Elias' photograph Fractured Heart and Marjorie Maddox's poem "Bury Our Heart" are part of a collaborative series by artist and poet to be exhibited March 22—April 13, 2019, at The Station Gallery, Lock Haven, PA. The poem appears in Maddox's re-released collection Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Wipf & Stock, 2018), which chronicles her father's unsuccessful heart transplant during the Blizzard of ’93. The book won the Yellowglen prize and was one of three finalists for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak book awards. Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry, a short story collection, and several children's books. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com