Give Me Your Junk

I want what is left,

The tea leaves, the soiled images on cares,

The gasp of words as meaning slip[s away.

The rinds of the alphabet,

The chewed poems of prisoners, of bones and skeletons,

The secretions, the shattered sperm, the blood,

Broken ova, phlegm, and cough.

It has always been women’s work to prepare the corpse.

But I will not make a corpse from these elements,

I will make a child.

I will make you such a rose of a child,

A rose of a child held in the crook of

The dark hand of a dead branch.

I will make you a child singing like an angel

From these elements of dark.

And the child will sing

“This is what we have,

This is what we must work with.

So give them to me.

First, your dead, moldering in the dreadful heat of your cities.

Then give m the iron birds in the sky with their demented warbling in the dusk.

I want your irradiant soil with its eternal deathly shimmer.

Give me everything mangled and bruised

And I will make a light of it to make you weep.

And we will have rain,

And we will begin again.”

Metzger is both poet and playwright, therapist and social-change activist, and also a breast-caner survivor.

"This is what we have. This is what we must work with..." — From our own bruised and mangled selves we can and will make a light, enough to make us weep together, and we will have rain, and we will begin again, here at UUCA, to create our heaven on earth. So be it!