The Fire needs to eat ? / Hathras

To Father Fire I ask. Implore. Demand

You could not have wanted this?

This choreographed sacrifice could not have been your plan.

The fire needs to eat 

The fire needs to eat

The fire needs to eat

So offer it some meat

When did your orange tongue develop such a taste for women’s bodies?

specially those that had not borrowed themselves from the Earth for even twenty years.

You could not have asked for this

Why are they feeding you, us.

Perhaps the wind trapped the wailing of our great great great grandmothers 

and played it into their sleep.

When they awoke to screaming wounds 

Only your brightness could distract the pain away 

and so you were summoned and made to stay.

Don't you have more power

Did you try saying No

Did they ask for your consent? Before they flung our bodies into your heat

We find ourselves right there many times a day, week, month, year, decade and century.

From that place, the rivers have taken us, the earth has reopened its womb.

Many a time

many a time

We made pitstops on battlefields and surgeons tables and mountain peaks

But your flames were always the last choice

A choice made of choicelessnesses

Is that why your are angry.

You feel left out ?

So this was not your longing then ?

We had hoped, indeed our grandmothers had hoped to emerge on the other side into a flowing sliver moon river whose nature is to be longed for.

And to be received by women’s arms of those that had crossed over before us.

Soft fingers, wrinkled fingers filling our orifices with nectar and petals and dew drops

And cold, fire-drowning clay - just in case you simmered in there still.

Just in case they had jammed you in hard enough and the blood had not stopped burning.

You felt left out so you took us

and the whole forest too

You made us trust the howling wind a little less, and look with suspicion at the sun

It is your ceaseless taking of our bodies at mysterious times in the dead of the night that made us banish ourselves from the moonlight and even more from moonless nights.

When its very very quiet like that and we lie still, 

so very still the bed can’t creak and the lungs can’t balloon and the water dare not drip

On nights like that I look deeply into the dark place between my legs and journey up the tunnel 

to the thundering in my chest.

On nights like that I feel you still warming the dark places in me.

Mother fire you are here…

You are then the river into which we submerge

You the womb that reopens for us to be born backwards through/into

You the destination, you the beginning

I am not angry with you

I know you didn't ask for this

This wasn't your plan.

This is all I Know

To take me through the night 

to take me from 'we' to 'me'.