Air
by Jesse Sorrell
Sorcha McNamara, Cherubs in Shelter, oil, gesso, ink, chalk and pencil on net curtain with oil on found perspex panels, site-specific gallery installation, dimensions variable, 2020-21. Courtesy of the artist.
Air
Jesse Sorrell | APR 2024 | Issue 32
You are not dreaming.
An owl is flying from the
west with a poem on her wings.
The poem is yellow. The yellow
could be the moon but it is not. You will
know this yellow by the time you fall asleep.
The poem is beating inside the fourth chamber of your heart. Wet blue. The whales are singing. Your heart wall is a cave of red vibration. The fires want to kindle into fuel. The poem is the silence swimming beneath the first ocean. A sound growing into an echo reverberating green throughout caves painted in symbol. A flare of heat initiating stars into a circular burst of sun.
The poem
is known to be yellow
because you are breathing.
You are safe in this poem. Breathe.
You are breathing while others are not.
The winds of death are thrumming around you,
pressing onto your chest, tearing your skin as if with
talons, clutching your heart, golden, this red blue throbbing.
You are spilling
yellow. You must know
you are not the first to spill yellow.
The spill is not wet. The whales know the poem is oxygenating the water so they are diving deep with song squeezing the chambers of their heart. Their songs will sound again. They will again spray water in rainbow patterning toward the sun but first you will feel their eyes watching you.
The whales, the owl, the children
are all watching with eyes bright and
tracing the golden threads electrifying the
silence forming between your inhale and exhale.
Watch for the poem with your own eyes and listen
with the fullness beyond your ears to stories in the air.
Dry heat is rising
from the scorched sun
beaten earth, shot forth with
petals whispering color from the roots.
Water is wetting the petals with memories
of the underground, of the blood spilled bodies caving
into themselves after the fire of living, of the sky reflecting
humans with the world in their hands whose dreams are slinking beyond
the tree line roaming wild before their flight into the night
sky upon the wings of an owl with eyes piercing
the illusion that the moon is anything but
wonder golden enough to vibrate
awake the insects encased
in amber to emerge
soaked
&
dripping
with time.
Bats are plunging the night while the owl
is watching humans living
between their first
& last breath,
each life a
rush of
air.
The moon is rising. Your mouth is dry,
swallow. Drink water warmed and stained flower
yellow. Be swallowed like honey. You will not die,
at least not from the yellow. I am not making promises.
Be still and listen.
The children are still
proclaiming their stories:
Our tongues are being severed from the root.
Loneliness is tearing through the atmosphere
to the count of unbreathed breathes left in
our lungs. A great silence is striking
from the sky and filling our bodies.
Our eyes are opening wide,
exploding the story we
were never meant
to inhabit.
We are dislocating ourselves into every body
still breathing between the river and the sky.
Our hearts gestate
before our spines strike into form with arms and
legs radiating from the shape of a star into fingers and
toes wriggling at the hand of life. Close your eyes to dance the formless
night sounding the ocean birthing the future wide across the wings of an owl.
Life and death are breathing through us.
Violence is the human heart attacking itself
exploding spines lungs arms fingers legs and toes
into the shape of our lives ending at their beginning.
You are carrying our deaths.
Our mouths are announcing our futures alive.
Our eyes are piercing the smoking air.
Our tongues are golden suns.
The sun is bowing high the moon.
The whales are diving deeper.
Poems are storying the air.
Your heart is breathing.
The wings of night are bulging against the spine of the world. The moon is a chorus of silence. You are hearing shapes. You are emerging from amber. Your lungs are chanting. The children are dying in the hands of the world. They will return. The night is watching. You are weightless.
Your eyes are going to dream. In the west an owl is spreading her wings with a poem so clear
to you
of animal & child
yellow is the light
Jesse Sorrell writes to listen between physical and subtle form. He offers spiritual care in community-based, pediatric hospice & palliative care, bereavement, and other therapeutic settings. He lives surrounded by trees and animals in Chapel Hill, NC and is often found in water. His writing is thrilled to make home in KHÔRA.
Sorcha McNamara works as a painter, or more accurately as a maker of things. But even ‘maker’ isn’t really the right word. It’s too organic, too suggestive of the handmade, or the nobility of a craft. Instead, she is more of a conductor, a composer — the person in front of the orchestra waving their arms about, whose function and purpose you may question, but you know they are important for the stability of the whole piece.
Based in the West of Ireland, Sorcha holds an MA in Art + Research Collaboration from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology (2024), and a BA in Painting from Limerick School of Art & Design (2019). Her works have been exhibited in Ireland and internationally, in Tokyo, Lisbon and London. She has previously been selected for residencies at Totaldobze Art Centre, Riga (supported by Ormston House, Limerick and the Artist-Run Network Europe project, 2022); JOYA AiR, Almeria (2022); Tangent Projects, Barcelona (2021); and PADA Studios, Lisbon (2020). Her practice is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.