Seeking meaning in prayers, in tarot cards.
Endless scrolling
On the phone
Listening to soundbites from strangers,
Looking for wisdom and solace in the form of platitudes and easy slogans.
Anything to signpost the way through.
Bright screen.
Dead of night.
Ruining the darkness,
The solitude,
The peace,
The rest.
Emily’s cold and wild December
Her grey-white dreary …
And Natasha, sensible of her own ruin.
A piece of her flesh deep inside
Shrunken
Pitted and pale …
Never to be fully restored to health.
Still it weeps when it is worried and poked and proded and picked at.
All that zeal was locked away long ago but some swell of feeling escaped and changed, surrendered to itself, to sorrow and pain.
Flip one card, and the next, flash of lurid colours.
Lines dabbed and scored in ink.
The weight of Judgement so final and decisive. Unfeeling, unthinking.
Uncertainty crystallises, it hardens and creeps up the sides of the heart.
Made brittle, as though it had always been made of glass.
The Tower
Lies crumbling
Hulks breaking off
Turning to dust between fingers.
The lie, that there is reason, a plan, a path
A reason.
What next to divine
In the blank and endless wilderness
A purgatory between the world that is
And the one that used to be.
The one that worked in sympathy with ebb and flow of
Our courageous vulnerability, our fears, our joy
At all that we had found, all that we recognised.
Squandered, discarded.
Light bedimmed now, never shining.
The Hanged Man Reversed
Everything is paused, suspended, waiting…
The stillness overwhelms,
The centre cannot hold,
The atoms fly apart,
And we are left with nothing,
Nothing.
Nuture we our pretty lies
Such is our need to conceive
To construct the shapes of meaning
With tentative fingers, working blind, elbow deep, picking through the mire
Turning over our humble treasure in the palm.
The randomness of a piece of wire, a muddy coin, a button here, a buckle there …
Trying to make sense
Where there’s no sense to be found.
Robyn Hunt (c) 2023
