Earth
by Jesse Sorrell
Sorcha McNamara, Lazy Eye/Minty, oil, perspex, laminate and wood, 7.48 x 6.89 x 0.43 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
EARTH
Jesse Sorrell | May 2024 | Issue 33
You are entering your death.
You will be alive at the end of this poem.
From the center of the earth sounds an old story:
They will be of star and clay.
They will weep emerald tears.
Time will keep holding its stare.
A silver night is casting from the horizon netting the sun and moon. Sky and stone are mirrors of mica. Stone is softening into a meadow in front of you. A sea voice is rising from behind you, ricocheting between the stones, traversing your back body, nestling into the crag of your shoulder blade. The ocean is waving you forward. An ancient hum is pawing through your back muscles, rounding your shoulder, lumbering along your clavicle, reaching across your ribs, burrowing into the third chamber of your mud mossed heart where the poetry is all fur and soil.
There is no fire in this cave carrying the scent of
honey berries & salmon. Time can see in the dark.
An owl blinks her yellow eyes. The earth spins.
A bear is descending from the north.
The land is taking back its voice. The grass
is a green scream. Dew is licking up
your leg with verdant tongue.
The whales know there
are so many ways
to be on
earth.
A giant paw is drifting
over the eye
of the world
looking
looking
looking
Everything more is possible
when the questions
in animals & children
are tended alive.
What is home if not a body
made to inhabit and
one day leave.
bears hunt by scent you smell your death
clay body star
fur soil
bears are their own poem in the human body
Your adrenaline is honey.
Your lungs are berries.
Your hamstrings are salmon.
Your knees are unshaping into clay.
Your scream is roping the stars.
Your eyes are filling with tears sharp as emeralds.
your eyes roll back into your skull / a net casts from your brain
to the horizon / memories spiral aurora green in your mind /
you have nothing to confess / you have everything to confess / hands
up hands down the feet the toes the legs the hips the heat wide open
the blood the shit the cock the clit the beyond between & ever
the gut the spine the back the chest the breasts the scars
the eyes the ears the nose the neck the throat the hair
the arms the veins the hands the heart the wound the womb the bones
the air the strikes the fire the flesh the pulse the pump the pang
the howl the voice the song the breath the lick bite blow
the wet the wave the cave the cum dear god the rapture
the garden the wine the bread the art the chaos the ocean
the mother the father the sibling the exile the child the animal
the body the birth the home the earth the death
the star the clay the fur the soil / poem /
you look up as prayer
your eyes lock with time
One swipe of the bear’s paw throws
your head to the left
lurching
your spine right
&
your heart
reaching
for your sacrum
in a moment
so still
you could be
reborn.
Every lover you’ve ever tasted refills your mouth.
The swift crack of your body bruises the sky green.
You crash onto moss. Love is possible.
Time is keeping watch of your body. Your flayed skin is layering into dirt. Your heart is gushing pure animal. Your blood is spurting song to the whales. The night is a silver silence. The sun doesn’t dare gold. The moon is new. The stars are a collective inhale. The trees keep breathing. Your body is a dismembered rite. A cave system of bone tunneling into the center of the earth.
Decomposition is a sporing of time,
a reaching across to the dead, a mouth open
and crawling with children. Your funeral
is the texture of moss kelp & fern
open to the casket of the world.
A trunk of a decaying cedar
declares your never found body.
Cedar because you loved owls.
The trunk is gashed as if by fire
or a bear’s claw. The trunk wound
is filled with soil and wild grasses.
You are sent downriver to the sea.
A boy with starlight for breath
prays a poem in a jade language:
A great leaving has arrived.
Butterflies were once painted in symbol
on cave walls during the dying process.
The story is the what happens to the body:
Wounds grow wings across the sacrum of the dying
hours before death. The green smell of decay
often arrives first. Healers ready the leaving.
The butterfly pollinates up the spine,
each vertebra a flower greening into color.
The bees collect pollen into honey.
A bear waits with a mouth wide open.
The dead are placed on their backs,
their spines into the earth
their eyes toward the sky
their souls pawed back to the stars.
Butterflies painted over their eyelids.
Their mouths filled with petals.
Their foreheads anointed with honey.
They are blooming through death.
Butterflies are everywhere now.
On the backs of mothers and children
spreading wings before the bullet enters,
after the missile strikes, in the land’s scream.
Do you see them?
Death is but a different shade of green.
A story is descending from the north. The north is not above the world. The world is a wound. The wound is a poem. The poem is soil and fur. Fur and soil are a poem of bear. The bear is entering the time of star and clay. Clay and star are forming through bones. Bones are a cave system into the center of the earth. The center of the earth is an altar. The altar is holding a butterfly wing. The butterfly wing is torn with spots. The spots are tears. The tears are emerald.
Your mouth is wide open.
I am listening.
Sorcha McNamara, Lazy Eye/Minty, oil, perspex, laminate and wood, 7.48 x 6.89 x 0.43 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
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.