The outcast lay in the autumn rain
Art - Brian Nunes, The Worldtree, 2016
The outcast lay in the autumn rain,
sodden with her constant pain,
shivering with the fire spent,
doubting she could kindle it.
Traumas racked her lying there
amid her cinders in despair,
resurrecting every ill
afresh as if they batter still.
Minus reason to believe
her life would bring her anything
but utter grief and suffering,
she sank into a gloomy sleep.
Lying with the living earth
along her length, she rode a surge
that astrally connected her
in counsel with her ancestors.
In the dream, she was a budding
leaf upon an ancient tree
in Africa, rooted fast
10,000 generations back.
Loving flowed right up the trunk
to lift her up from where she’d sunk,
branch to limb to twig to her,
she blossomed high above the earth!
Every mother gave her grace,
sisters eased her graven face,
fathers offered strong embraces
that had been till then replaced with
expectations
disappointment
criticism
narcissism
shaming
blaming
absence
distance
disrespect and
disregard.
As she bloomed and stretched and spread
she sensed a different flow instead…
sensed the dread and trepidation
from the prior generations.
Felt each trauma, every fear
across 200,000 years
that lingered with them unresolved,
in the astral, unabsolved.
Then, she hazily awakened
to a graze across her face,
and opened up her eyes to see,
a fallen
autumn
umber
leaf.
Smiling as she stretched to rise,
she kept the leaf as a reminder
she did not choose out tonight;
she stayed instead to set it right.
Lee DeNoya - Atlanta 2021