Bottle Green and Shadow Warmth

By Shereen Rana

Bottle Green 

Resurrect.
 
You think of what's more to history than just mouths. 
Fists, towers, weeds, edible roots. Running out of
 time. The holy rust on the nail. 
And you think the light falls between your shoulders, you beg 
to feel the first star a person ever saw in the earth, to 
turn like the moon does, breathing in, full, in bloom. 
Kiss the ground beat your fist on your thigh. 
You turn to the moon, 
but the moon only reaches the ghosts of the moonflowers,
go back, 
go back, 
but the rage of the sunlight picks things apart like you cannot.
 
So you stand and look at the ghosts. 
Balance. 
Their moonlight touches you back. 
Moonflowers, 
the shadows of the forest floor 
and top and the stems 
unfurl a new love. The rage is a dream in the ground. 
But love knows all about branches

Shadow Warmth 

And then there is the mellow dark. It settles around you 
or you settle in it, and it becomes an old friend—promises 
between the fingers, humming, threadbare rage, roots 
and rest. 

The white rose is a belief run astray, 
but you believe anyway, because you need something, 
you need your eyes to close again, 
you need hope like a vein in your wrist. 
In the dark, astray, 
with a net shaking in your own lovedressed hands, it’s easier to 
stumble upon things. Things like your heart asleep on the 
windowsill of the world.