Did Ixtab greet you under the cosmic yaxche tree, welcoming you into

her version of paradise? Was she a compassionate second mother when

you arrived, performing rituals for your soul’s transformation?

Venus held you, dangling from the sky, but these afterlife deities

sought no judgement, unlike that manufactured God who condemns.

You sacrificed yourself in love, as Romeo did; yet archetypal mythologies

sent us a storm of annihilation.

I exist with many scorch marks upon me, wishing my eyes closed like yours;

my slain warrior child. Ever watchful, I stand gumbooted, akin to a girl

in wintertime who sees only the intricacy of snowflakes.

Motherwort offers no remedy for this; her barbed seed-heads scythe my flesh,

and the self-heal in the lawn is mown away. The opacity of the separate realms

we inhabit, is a leaf quivering on a silken thread in the breeze,

dead but still moving.

Note on the poem. Ixtab: Mayan Goddess of suicide