Sky Kiva (Rev. Matt Syrdal)

I lay on the warm limestone lip
Flat back to the split shelf
Feeling fleeting shades of
Ancient standing movements huddling together
In a sound swarm
Under breaking darkness.

A glimmer of winking sky lights
like bright beads threading moons and seasons
Sews my slipping thought
through the loom
Framed high above the lid of the world
This place a storehouse. 
A story dwelling.

My eyes overhear the stone gestures
Stained with the memory of red rains
and the shifting faces of the seasons
These oral imprints beating in bronze veins
plunging beneath vast arroyo floor
Cracked hot with wash of rain baked stone

And then
A cooling breath drips down like milk
from alcove breast
I know this place now. 
Her story comes. 
Into me. 
Solid thighs Inviting me.
The predator and the prey
I am being watched, hunted.
Strikes fear like flint spark
alive in holy awe under
powder lit white moon
A long grief caked
in cornmeal and ash.

Down below in the night sounds watching
Wings and the words of stringed cicada
Far off, I hear, a chill howl
Drowning in the drum of my human hearing
Pounding
Pure fear my ear laid low
To rumbling purr beside me, inside me.
Death paws racing at my clawing heart.
Alive! 
Washed absolutely clean
Resolute In pure Animal fear. 
Presence.

I am not awake nor asleep.
I wake in sleep, Dreaming.
The azure cosmos torn open
like hieroglyphic speech
Like remembering the First Day
She walks slowly across the sky
Like a Seed of Fire in comet’s mouth
Running like a doe on bright tails
Yellow, red, blue, and white. 
Merged.
In memory of the First Birth.
And the wild fire dance
impregnating Earth.

The next vision - a portent
facing the future.
Sohu arising at dawn from
the subterranean shadows of the kiva
Bright morning star
katsina
Erotic flame bursting in
ecstatic supernova.
Downloaded without understanding,
Simply beholding.
The way the Old Ones
Beheld the work of the wasps
and the way the birds build
Round shapes, ritual dwellings.
high up under the warm breast
of cliff lip. 
The way the skin and the
slowly moving body of the land
makes walls
and patterns wisdom
Stories for her children
to Remember.

###

Rev. Matthew Syrdal is Associate Pastor for Spiritual Formation at Grace Presbyterian Church in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and founder / lead guide at WilderSoul/Church of Lost Walls. See more of Matt's breakthrough writings on AllCreation.org.