“Here is the pit…”
said the priest of the bat goddess.
Pallid, motionless—his countenance obscured, bone-like beneath the veil.
He slowly pulled his hand from his robe and extended his arm to direct his skeletal index finger upon a black void in the earth.
This was the place I thought could redeem me. So he brought me to the mound.
I know I have the choice to stay here, with his teachings, or wait and observe.
Yet I know my feeling in my chest pushes me right over the edge.
I scream out for the many gods I know the names of.
As my fall is not over quickly, it goes on and on.
I lose all concept of time and space.
I can no longer hear my own voice, but I still pray or scream or cry to the pantheon of ages.
And still, I continue to fall…
Nothing reaches for me.
No hand. No call for hope.
No gods are here in this place of illusion.
No gravity.
No mother or father.
Only my undying faith—to be blind and in peril…
I sleep.
As I fall. Or as I stop falling to sleep?
In my dream, I saw a ladder, and upon the ladder was my father.
He had no God.
He had a heart.
A voice of reason…
And when I wake, I realize I have been asleep in a pit, but it is no deeper than a grave.
Yet this pit is also where I have always been, because I chose this—for years, months, or days?
A grave of my father’s father.
An indoctrinated throne of bones and dirt.
Then I say out loud, in hopes that the skeletal figure is still out there, waiting for me…
I say a phrase, something that I thought I could not say…
“I do not know what I do not know.”
Silence…
“‘I don’t know’ is the rope I must use to climb from ignorance,” I yell, in confidence.
Then suddenly, an uncoiled and swift drop of a thick and newly wound cord ascends to me.
I climb, and I smile.
I accept, and I think to myself that I will ask more questions—
before I embrace the fool’s journey into madness ever again.
By Zee Witch, 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment