Featured Poem:

Kintsukuroi

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“To repair with gold, the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.”

In Plato’s symposium
at the banquet,
Aristophanes announced
to minds that had gathered to speak of matters
of the heart.
In the beginning,
the human being had two faces,
four arms,
four legs
and two hearts.
God, in his infinite wrath
or eternal love,
separated the human being
and we,
in our current form,
were brought into existence
to forever search
for our other half.

Occasionally,
twin souls find each other
and if you squint
at just the right angle,
a golden thread can be seen
knitting auras together,
fixing lives
that were ripped apart
too early in the makeup of time.
But hearts age,
change,
and two hearts
don’t always remember
how to beat as one,
so irregular rhythm
has them beating
against each other
until they shatter.

Do you remember
scratching in the dust
trying to find the pieces
of your heart?
Do you remember
sitting late
into the night
of your life,
trying to sew the shards
together with silver thread
that was almost
not strong enough
to hold dreams intact.
And now, you walk amidst strange
souls that have too many limbs,
with a tattered heart,
not quite sure
why your pulse
beats so different.

Sometimes you have nightmares
of the gods ripping you in half
and your screams reach the sky
where a little girl
turns over stars
and strings them together
with silver,
looking for a constellation
that has her mother’s face,
who left her
when she was still learning
to crawl
on the moon,
and though it hurts,
she searches and searches and searches,
because not all soul mates
are lovers.

On rare nights,
she cries
and it rains
and her tears
land, salty on our skin
and remind us of our scars,
for we too
stand on the precipice
of this world
and fear falling
and cracking
like pottery,
because it hurts
and we can’t always
find all the pieces
to put ourselves back together
again, once clumsy hands
have dropped us from the wall,
to the ground.

There’s no number of king’s horses
and king’s men
that can mend
a broken spirit,
but too many little girl’s spirits
have been broken by men
pretending to be kings,
and now,
ripped sheets act as a barrier
as she wards off
Prince after Prince,
hiding her beauty,
for isn’t that what gave her
these wounds in the first place?

These scars heal slowly
and sometimes they bleed,
but our blood is holy
and golden,
we are fragile but it is our resilience
which makes us beautiful.
These scars which mar our backs
Are the creases of flesh
from which
our silver tipped wings
are waiting to escape.
And it hurts
when feathers rip through skin,
when molten gold runs through scars,
when we are ripped apart
just so our heavy fingers can fumble at
pulling ourselves back together.

But, if Aristophanes
could see us now,
he would announce to those minds
gathered to discuss matters
of the heart;
‘Gentlemen, not even god could rip them apart”.
And I don’t think
menders of pottery could full comprehend
the tenacity,
the beauty,
the resilience
of the lacquer of our scars,
because if they did,
they would have used our pain
instead of gold.

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