Moving woman

Oceans, mountains, raindrops,
sand in the palm of a hand,
and you, a moving woman.
Can it be you are moving?
Foible entire, storm and whim,
wit and tongue slip,
bluff, bravado and camouflage?
God-cornered, God-struck,
time’s tainted pride?
Spinning folly’s hoop of jewels
wheeling a wintry sun,
pared nail, new moon,
scimitar sound,
cornucopial mouth and lip
rounding to speak you
metamorphized,
all toe-tip teeter, sidestep,
waver and backtrack of you?
Is it really you
hefting that bag of dreams,
the one you’ve been keeping
since deep in dreamtime
when you raised the sky
for breath to breathe free?

You move
as if time were feathers,
and you, wind for setting them free.
Is this the fierce force
that shifts your axial inclination?
Unwinds the chains
that bound you silent?
Whose the intuition
and patient execution?
You move as if to convene word
that you are who you are,
true as the next walking shadow,
no longer the fruit of chaos
unrepentant and unredeemed,
dug out and put to use
for display purposes,
planetary maintenance
or propagation of the faithful.
More real than any death throe
or barrier of blind negation,
you have come to understanding
all as the Oneness of mystery,
you, the beating of its heart.

Is it barely possible,
nakedly newly possible
that, after the travails of centuries,
wars, child-birthings, hungers
and poverties past numbering,
submissions equally incalculable,
that, awkward as a novice clown,
you are careening
your circuitous way
toward living a life
not set into place
like a statue or a building?
Is there the slightest chance
that your tentativities,
unsureties , self-doubts, guilts
and recriminatory shudders
have undergone a sea change?
That you, woman, divinely real,
seized by your divinity,
captured by your inner sun,
live Atonement?