Firstborn (Ya'aburnee)

Glass clouds shed their autumn skin

Kiss the mourning stems as they bow to the wind

Heads hung like wartime mothers

As the congregants struggle to console one another

We're bandaged together, soothing the surcease

Huddled inside the fog beneath the barren trees

Budding youth, unfettered by absolutes

Do branches wither first when there's blood on the roots?

Can you stretch a moment into a thousand?

Away from the quiet collapse of it all

I know the know who knows you, I see the see who sees you

I'll follow you into forever

I memorized your pain

I put my thoughts inside your name

Little light, can't you see?

You're supposed to be the one who buried me

I tried to stop the flood, I tried to pull you from the tide

Now you paint the sky with distant fire

The room lay quiet, sowing silence

Watching lifelines stream through wilting arteries

Dreams crash with awe behind your roving eyes

How I envy the calm that occupies your mind

Drifting just above the flatline

That keeps your thoughts displaced from mine

I can't divert the current

I divide and wash ashore

I'll try to write you to rest

Plant you inside my prose

Yet my resolve

Does it shake beneath a four-foot casket shadow?

The ink has spilled across the page

Shaping surviving sun to shade

Valleys and peaks, in grief

Descent into a ceaseless sleep

See how the night unfolds

Constellations welcome you home

Adrift in the river beyond our memories

You bury me

I memorized your pain

I put my thoughts inside your name

Little light, can't you see?

You're supposed to be the one who buried me

I tried to stop the flood, I tried to pull you from the tide

Now you paint the sky with distant fire

I memorized your pain

I put my thoughts inside your name

Little light, can't you see?

You're supposed to be the one who buried me

I tried to stop the flood, I tried to pull you from the tide

Now you paint the sky with distant fire