Suppurating into the wound
between the last year
and the first,
through the nameless interval
where years devour themselves
and tissue remembers dying
before flesh has learned
to call itself born—
There I hung—
forlorn,
unbodied,
a question suspended
from the invisible branch
of becoming.
I pressed my fingerprints
into words still molten
from the planet’s buried fire.
They hardened beneath my hands,
turning inward,
toward asphyxiation.
Dissolve, then—
descend into the womb before form,
into the black orchard
where shadows flower
on midnight trees.
Deep Time arrives
without arriving.
It opens its ancient mouth
and speaks in lacerations:
age entering age,
death becoming sleep,
sleep breaking open
as birth—
the newborn cry
containing
the last breath,
the last breath
already becoming
a filament
of smoke,
rising—
not toward heaven,
but memory.
Memory gathering
around sculpted tombs.
Stone remembers.
Stone forgets.
Around the Earth
the infinite cold
listens.
Was It ever there—
unseen—
before the first stone
received a name?
Before the hand,
before the mouth,
before the first mark
scratched its brief claim
into the dark—
what was I?
A fragment
of bedrock remembering?
A shadow
cast backward
from unborn light?
Or the question itself,
waiting for a body
to give it breath?
And I ask—
before the names disappear,
before the last inscription
is ground back into nothing,
before the holy Silence ceases:
Am I whom?
And if no stone
remembers my name,
if no darkness
absorbs my shape,
if memory
forgets itself—
who, then,
was asking?
Traol Chú Mhara