Your Voice

There is a voice that doesn't use words. Listen.- Rumi

I rolled out of bed with my eyelids heavy with poetry

And I rubbed my eyes onto the eager page 

Unmistakable words darkened the white space 

Rearranging themselves into something palpable 

Closing my eyes in recollection of the night before

All I see is your voice, as though it were a vision

Emanating from places further than geography 

Only a finer place than this can give rise to it 

Tempted am I, to slip on the red chiffon dress you like

To twirl to the elegance of this unintentional song

But your voice pulls me into the rolling waves 

Of your love lullaby, calling me to an essential rest

It insinuates me onto the centre of a tall butte

Where everything falls away on all sides of it

Summoning peregrines to perch on gloved hands

The centre holds and nothing falls apart

It is an elaborate yet simple thing, your voice

Substantial and securing but unencumbering

A whole mood and meditation; a coming ashore

After a long swim in the long days of making a living 

A drifting to sleep, it is a recumbent love

With a pitch that rolls me into a yawning reprieve

Turning pillows into clouds that hold my head gently

Flight above the tundra of barren and frivolous personalities

Your voice hushes the Cassandra within me

The anxieties of the next morning are vitiated

With that, the land of nod welcomes me into its city gates

In my sleep, like Sade's Somalian woman

I comb its streets for pearls of poetry with my eyelashes

With a heart full of love instead and not stones

Hallelujah...