They taught me the colors of the enemy
They taught me the colors of the enemy.
On a map they are red, and we are black.
Our uniforms, of course, were camouflaged,
sometimes the mixed colors of a forest,
sometimes the mixed colors of sand.
The woman who stood in front of me though,
during formation, had bright red nails.
When she stood At Ease, I watched them.
They were the color of blood
covered with shellac.
Later she had a stroke and, as they say, “almost died.”
But she survived and, like the rest of us, could,
I suppose, be said to “almost live.”
I learned no lessons from her, other
than how on those bright mornings
she troubled the colors, and made me take note:
the way the sky above us then was blue, the clouds
wispy white and high, the birds against them, flying away—
even the cardinals—looked dark—not red, but black.
And everything then was so open and light
and full of possibilities it seemed
that if we walked away
there would be places that,
even without a map,
we could almost go.
~
Now we enter the time of the water bearer
In the chill before dawn, I trudge out
across the crusty snow. I fill buckets of water
for animals who huddle together
under their steamy breath.
We are so cold here.
We transform water and air to breathe.
We stay alive.
So much of us is water, moving
through its shifting states, from solid, to liquid, to air,
an uncountable currency
we share, often freely. Though there are seasons
and times of withholding.
It is winter now. There is ice.
Far off, there are wars. They rumble across
the airwaves, a dry thunder of need.
At night I hear the far cries of children.
They echo against the tin of my insides.
They are beyond the reach of my buckets.
All winter I do what I can.
All winter I walk out beneath stars.
Orion hunts me across the frozen ground.
He tracks the shadows of small things
in the cold starlight. He arcs above us.
He claims the sky.
All winter I am empty and full
with awe at his beauty.
I submit to his coldness. To his distance.
But now, in the western sky, he sinks.
His stars fade. In the east now a thin light seeps
into the crevices of trees.
Now we enter the time of the water bearer.
Somewhere to the south the sky pours his stars
into a pool of darkness
called the celestial sea.
The stars there are dim, as if submerged.
The Arabs, who named the stars,
named these stars lucky.
Sadulmelik, they said: “Lucky one of the king.”
Sadulsud, they said. ‘Luckiest of the lucky”
Sedachbia, they said. “Lucky star of hidden things.”
In the dark I think: being glimpsed, and named,
when you are so faint, so far away,
is something lucky.
That the luck lies there,
more than with what stars bring–
though the ancients said
these stars bring rain.
Soon here, too, rivulets will begin to run
under the shining floors of ice.
The rains will come.
With my staff I will shatter
the frozen rubble, so that what lies beneath it
may flow, and live.
And on the cusp of this year
and from this cup of my life, I too
will go out among the elements.
I will pour myself out,
unseen to unseen,
across the dark waters of the sky.
I will be changed.
(January 2023)
~
Martha Highers has published work in Rattle, Louisiana Literature, The Gettysburg Review and other journals, most recently in Panorama, Poets Reading the News, and The Iris Review. She edits the creative nonfiction journal Under the Sun.