SEAN DONAHUE
Photography ©2004 Fred Ellis

COMPASIVA

You wore track marks like stigmata
as though needles piercing your flesh
could somehow transmute the sins
enacted on your body,

as though you could tear deep enough
to rip away memory
and emerge wet and fragile like a newborn.

But now your skin has healed,
soft and moonlike,

and your eyes are the cool green
of the pool Tara was born from
when a single tear landed in the water,

and your muscles pull me deep inside you,
reminding me that resurrection comes
not from iron nails and battered bodies,
but from the pungent warmth
of rich soil and rotting leaves
where dry seeds sprout
and grow toward the sun.