StormDance--CWLA Version

It's raining again. The eye of the storm has passed over, leaving me breathless to enter the other side.
Now I'm here, and so far behind because I was ducked back into the water without a breath.
I can't see. Can't see anything at all. It's dark and black, and all around me.
The noise is deafening, thunderous, whining...like a black hole would sound if you could hear it.
I'm so battered, so tired, so weak. My muscles are quaking in pain and exhaustion.
One step takes all my strength. I don't see how I make it to two.
I'm cold, always so cold and wet and miserable...and I can't see or hear anything.
The forest around me only exists because I saw myself enter it.
And now I can only place timid hands in front of me to fend off the world.
The Dark Night of the Soul. Midnight to 3:00 am. Can't see. Can't feel anything but fear.
And yet my body moves of its own accord not even stopping to think that maybe I'm moving with the storm, not out of it.
My head is bowed against the torrent--wind and rain, mud and ice all around--battered, so battered.
Can you see it? The storm that threatens looms menacingly over the earth like a void in space and time sending me into the depths of a valley so deep, so dark that the only light, the only warmth is that inside of me.
The only hope is the little light, the little candle flame, the little coal that sits inside my heart like a golden promise, or a memory of better days.
But that promise is what drives me, it gives me the strength the power to put one weary foot before the other on my way out of this forest, this valley, the storm.
Into the golden fields that are promised: my place of rest.
I yearn for those hills where milk and honey wave to me from the grasses. Where the warmth of the sun soaks into my skin to the depths of my soul.
Where the tent is a welcome shade of rest that calms. Oh, the blessed tent.
So I place one weary foot before the other and walk on, hands timid, head bent into the wall of water--into the wind and the storm.
For the warmth inside me whispers, "Yet shall there be rest, yet shall there be peace, yet shall there be a time when you shall dance with joy in Abelmeholah, the Meadow of the Dance, because this trial will have strengthened your legs, your body, so that you can bear to last through the long night."
And so I put one weary foot before the other, my chest warm with the promise.
And the wind howls, the water stings and the earth moves beneath me but I accept it with arms outstretched as I let it take me where it will--dancing in the storm so that I may have the privilege of dancing without--in Abelmeholah.


*StormDance is a prose version of the poem Dancing in the Storm. This is a trial run for a piece that must be submitted to my poetry class tonight. Yep, I'm behind. But when you have two group presentations to study for, 160 kanji to review, a japanese test to study for, an extra credit paper to write, and review of all the world lit. up till the end of the semester, poetry gets put on the back burner. Sigh. I may or may not submit this, but I thought I'd see how it would look. I'll be posting several others I'm sure.


--MovingGirl