EMERGENCE by Janavi Held

We Have all had times in our lives were we feel deep inner transformation occurring as we are going through hard times...

This poem tracks the plunge into pain and despair, the tuning to God, the expelling of inner demons, and ultimately the phoenix rising from the flames.

The video was made for the poem, mapping the journey from dark to light, from the prison of the mind, to the embrace of dear friends.

Emergence

by Janavi Held

1

I punctured the universe

for a place to grow my heart.

The blood of my endeavors

soaks into a history of crying artists.

I sit with that race

gazing at

a catastrophe of visions unmet

exploding into odd, disorienting shapes

which can't breath anymore,

can't give birth.

I have penetrated

the unseen universe

with a chant.

2

It has lips and eyes

this universe.

Its stomach and lungs are vacuums,

yet I am unseen,

seeking  a  deep ocean,

a restless bit of oxygen,

my mind strikes at lost bits of thought

floating, surfacing in the void,

sticking to molecules

inherited by a now disembodied voice

shrill with a definition to eat.

"You don't know how to echo." He said

and she ate ever so slowly

and her silent story was born.

Endless silence,

roped and tamed darkness,

in wordless voids

and blocked throats indignant with sorrow.

Lips shut on endless traps

and an inexplicable pallor takes hold

as breath cannot enter

the cave of her blue lungs.

Silence is a dark dawn,

Silence is the heart she owns and no one remembers.

Silence is the dream she cannot tell

and the memory trapped in her fists.

3

The stars chant at night

their light sinks into her belly

and by their grace

the deepest places are restored, set right.

This is not skin that moves

these are tectonic places in the deep,

there a thoroughly transcendent spirit appears
wildly in love

and without citizenship in any man-made country.

4

Her favorite apparition

has materialized

forming strange patterns

of light in the sky

above her seat.

Long histories melt

surrendering

to the center

of silence.

And all that

has come to pass

fades

as time swallows

the relevance

of past circumstance.

Deliberate poltergeist echoes

leaving slowly,

long shadows

and earth colored jewels

buried in decisions: seeing.

5

It is too luxurious for yesterday,

to depleted for today.

And then there is that long breath,

that sigh humming

full now,

awake now.

And that echo moves

softly, leaving, fading,

into a lesson,

into an historic ordeal.

episodic ruined minutes and years,

lost forever into the summery of what was.

Mourning remains

in the echoes atomic space

mourning for what disintegrated,

for what was born,

for the hours never to return,

for the grace achieved

and the courage

which has taken

the echoes place.

6

A new breath

clamors into her lungs

as flight takes liberty with the air,

the free summer has crossed

the expensive path of spring

paying for freedom.

7

Time slips from her open mouth.

Leaving a dawnless year.

Immortality its only gift.

She sees tomorrow

looming large

dripping from her hungry heart,

seeping from her longing skin,

drenching her eyes, requesting

the Eternal Future to define her present.

No longer will she sit

with mythology eating at her mind

and the archetypes, the seers looking

for the path she should take.

She is lost to those stars

and to the hands of fortunetellers.

8

Now she abandoned her past to a whisper.

And the archetype?

He is dying now.

And his rotting corpse she is removing.

one decaying organ at a time.

And now there is a maze unwinding

its pathways are like her veins

complex languages of blood and memories

untangling

as she surrenders what is not her.

9

A banished wanting

gets into her eyes

and cries her soul back to life

after the death of

a thousand tongues

and the Soul of the universe

drops a paradox

of fertilizing sound

onto her garden.

A siren comes to life

from the death

of a thousand births

and the longing

of an ancient child slips

from her jealous hands

and bleeding wounds

can't suppress

what they are thinking.

The soul did not breath

without her voice.

Her deities have

have brought her back to life

from a

long hibernation

of speech.

10

And the chant is louder now

she is unfolding

dusty wings, slowly, carefully, one at a time.

The future unfolds her out of my lungs,

out of the bleak forecasts of the fortunetellers

she rises, contrary and golden,

she is the archetype shattering the phoenix,

destroying the mythology of hell,

stretching into my arm,

hand in my hand,

outliving the past

in my lungs

she breathes.

And now the Supreme Soul speaks:

I am birth,

and the dawn and the eastern sky,

the first love, and the love that lasts forever.

I am a flower opening,

the chanting of monks

and the Devotion of the Divine

listening clearly now:

I see

I have wings spreading

towards my own eyes.

and

The sky is falling today

into my open mouth.

It is the dawn to which I listen.

Awake again.

Artwork by the author, Janavi Held

Janavi Held started writing poetry and wandering around with her father’s camera as a child.  At the age of nineteen, she began practicing Bhakti yoga. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Goddard College where she studied poetry, photography, and media studies.  She is on the verge of releasing her first book Letters to my Oldest Friend: A Book of Poetry and Photography. 

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