The Cinnamon Peeler and the Pope

Two poems contributed by Bec. Thanks, Bec! Keep sending those poems in, I've got 30 plus tables to fill, plus reading poetry at this late stage in the game is comforting and relieves me of my fret and stress I feel sometimes creeping into my body.

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michale Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bard dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you would never walk through markets
with the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
through you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

        this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

                  and knew

        what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

Abyss by Karol Wojtyla
Abyssus abyssum invocat (Deep calleth on deep - Psalm 41)

You always see it as space
filled with cascades of air
where glass splinters reflect and glitter
like seeds planted in distant stones.

Now observe the abyss that glitters
in the eye's reflection.
We all bear it in us.
When men are gathered together
they shift the abyss like a boat
on their shoulder.

Nothing to bypass in this commotion.
Take a ray from the eye and write
your sign.
Though you see no abyss in the mind
don't imagine that it is not there.
Light may not reach your sight, but the boat
shifts on to your shoulders;
the abyss is clothed in flesh,
become Fact
in all men.