And if I were to touch your hand as all the trees in the world bent down their green leafy heads to listen to the stars falling out of the sky to fill the sleepy baskets of your enormous eyes, would you hear me?
Would you see one person, two people, cloaked in rain and sorrow, hundreds of dark figures embracing their white shadows out under the moon at the sea's end, their desires soaked up by the wet hungry sand, their unity a burning forest, their naked bodies turning turning turning turning towards each other and towards me, tumbling into eternity - would you hear me?
Would you turn over a rock and out would jump a bird's song, would you ask a question and it would wend its way softly into infinity, would you struggle to cry tears that contained no venom, would the dawn embrace you as so many arrows have pierced me, would doves and gulls fly in and out of the windows of the world's worst slums, would music float out in colored ribbons all over the universe, would the berries of tomorrow feed us today when you finally heard me?
Would you remember thrill and hope and longing, would the mountains split open and contain us and then seal themselves back up again, would angels hear us when we weren't speaking and silently trill sweet sad songs to each other, would we walk and talk in mysterious rhythms, would we be hypnotized by ghosts and passing trains as someone's anonymous lips touched the cold marble of Time again and again and again as we stared disbelievingly - then would you hear me?
Would the crow dance and out of its black and red cape of mourning there would fall the lightest feathers of healing, would the river sing and the wind hop and the snow moan and the daredevil dream and the ocean ring and our hearts become attune as a tuning fork twanging its constant aching bell - would you hear me?
Hear me, hear me, hear me, hear me, hear me, hear me, hear me, be near me, the world is speaking to us.
Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist, critic and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment For The Arts award, two Wisconsin Arts Board awards, a Co-Ordinating Council Of Literary Magazines Award and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of Where The Waters Meet, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards and a Commitment To Community Television Award. She is a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology (and has received one herself), the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association (for her book The Hand On The Head Of Lazarus), has published several books of poetry and has published poetry and fiction in hundreds of literary periodicals. She has reviewed (online) music for Music Room Reviews, films for Movie Room Reviews, Movie Scribes, and FilmSay, books and films for Book Room Reviews, and books for The Small Press Review (print editions) and has just begun reviewing books of poetry for the FutureCycle Press website. She also creates and shows collages professionally.
