Chapter Text
did your mother ever tell you,
or was it just mine, who said my
heart would belong to where i met
my first love? did your mother too
pass her gift down,
all she could,
from daughter to daughter,
and left you kneeling at the feet
of love, of first love?
i think, then, that my heart lives in fields.
a dance in past tense, it flutters,
the song of sweet summer innocence pulling
beneath unwelcome teeth.
my first love was mosquito bites.
i hung them out with laundry: tea tree oil
and lemon. it was leaping fear;
little feet on piles of straw, and the taste
of rebellion.
my heart had no shackles, deep in the fields,
no binds but the knowledge
that this, too, would fade into memory.
buried deep in hay bales, it beats - the thump
of elephant's feet.
my first love was a girl, who knew not
the way syllables could so easily be
carved into spears,
who took no disgust in her words,
their edges rounded: wrong.
the girl is gone now, of course: supple skin
hardened into curves. and yet,
her heart remains in the fields
behind the country house.