Star of Bethlehem
A staircase leads me to the door of my cradle and my natal tongue as well as to the ancient fig tree, standing like a matriarch amidst the soils and beads. Before I had even slipped those pelvic bones, the figs were already there. In the wavering weather, I was born.
The years have passed like an epic ode to the drought, and I have watched the binding of her boughs, like bent limbs, with manila ropes. One of tow-colored, Caribbean current, and phoenix-blooded braids. It supported my body as I climbed into adolescence and into the carpentered seat.
A seat used by the romance of the sea, the drowning of corpses deep into the abyss and the sanctuary of an outlander. Swaying as a child that has just taken hold of the fragments of freedom, my thighs declaring force and burden.
Then, my uncle and his saw conspired against that lifting branch, for it had stretched and covered the eye of the breeze. The embrace of trees comes with seclusion. And this fig tree lost three of its central limbs, a stranger might sense the perfidious creator had left this half-sculpted clay and took over another.
I try to attend to its cicatrices, caress her when there is no sky that bestows a javelin betwixt us, yet all that is left of her is a holed-colonization. There is no sight that a piculet takes residence amongst us, so this mortal shed is even crueler than nature.
My older sister and I had gone through a time where we laid on the grass and began excavating our garden’s soil, for a glance of our ancestor’s heirlooms, or a golden coin from when Joseph was sold. Our nails, then inhumed with the russet dirt, drew out metamorphic stones with an ensanguined crescent face.
And before we knew it, our wedded string of fortuity brought us back to the abode hanging upstairs, where a mounted frame of the holy land, by a stonemason’s thymed pantomime, now crows with its pensile blood.
My garden was once an orchard, but even with it now a gnome, the serpents roamed around it and those born amputees would try and hinder the angels on my praying forebears’ shoulders from furnishing their ave. But they were met with the bequeathed wright force of a Sepphoris descendant, and the limb of the shovel construed the road into a frightless anatomy.
All that dared to bloom around me held an immanent violence within, like a camellia forsaking its maternal sepal and disseminating its petals. I cannot look at a burgeoning flower and not think of how bodily excruciating it must be to be reborn, the sprouting of its beauty stings like the flight of an apterous moth.
And whilst we feast above the ornamentation of our garden, I notice how redness is a commoner, and the thorn a quotidian. And that Delphinium braid takes its familial structure as a bulwark against the Greek decollating presbyter, yet our perception mistakes its shades of softness as naivety.
But that consanguineous fig tree has left its circlets of labor, and for two years has bore rotten figs when their brethren were once Edenic. And for that loss, contemplation stormed and leaked into my streams. It is of lineal scorn that this fig tree arouses to be anachronistic, and to whom do I owe that she mirrors me?
She is a colonizee born under the inspection of the magi and betwixt the nocuous Bethlehem stars, where they imitate the perennial star escorting the motherly celestial to her hometown. And as these flowers recurve into obeisance, their glory coarcts into the back bent towards crucifixion.
I look more like a martyr with each passing, waning carpel. My assassination is to befall me as it did the fig tree, and I may be yet another poacher’s fantasy and a reiter’s leisure. I am thrown on the pallet of this fiendish world, and left I am with the entombed Canaanites. My holy liquor is the gluttony of the chaste, then what am I to the seated-feast of the last supper?
And I am a deer with mutated antlers, where shaped organizations are waiting to poach me inside an annular fence and then vaunt my murder like the beheaded God.
With this portal-like juvenile door looking like the uncanny, and my camp’s rivers flowing with roses, my hands are risen to the deafened sky and I beseech: Why did all the tales cross spectral powers, resuscitative prophecies, when I am left with stone hands to carry the shredded flesh scattered before me?
To whose weighted contentment must it be, that I am neither a prophet, nor a seer, not a saint, nor a messiah? The age of caliphate is beyond me, even, when its past beholds the greatest sedition history.
I was told that to be trialed by a stranger is a dread to you, how must your doomsday feel when you face the one foreigner you have been fleeing away from your entire life? Is it the standardized limbs humans grow that attests the anomaly?
