For My Sisters Who Love in Shadows

Mei Li

Gently Fierce

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Tags:

• Action LGBT
• human equality
• international audience
• LGBT
• love
• peace
• Uganda

For My Sisters Who Love in Shadows

I know my purpose is amidst everything,
I've never been a child of place, but of travel. I have never wanted
to know where I was going, I just trusted in the unraveling. All
things come to pass, each breath and season - a new beginning.
I've known most lovers to last five seasons, so I always leave
the kettle steaming and windows open. We don't need keys, its bad
enough our stories, voices, experiences are contained in boxes.

Some love is never experienced when the mind cannot
move beyond labels. There are lovers who have to be
strangers at night, I pray sweet silent songs
to carry them into dreams where their lovers
are beside them, holy in sunlight singing,
naked in moonlight whispering into spaces
of the body, below the ears, into the hallows of
collarbones - like caves - where they are waiting
to be touched by their lovers voices

Waiting to be touched with unpossessed freedom
to feel safe to love in wet rice fields,
safe to love in huts built of Soviet newspapers,

guarded villages, pillaged back roads, blown-out towers,
safe to love in the tenderest of hours
when we know not if the night will truly end
in time for another morning to begin

I pray to kiss them in their dreams, my hidden sisters
sharing glances like armored secrets, to kiss
them with honeyed lips and wet rose caves
pulsing open, to lay them down in beds of quartz
and malachite, jade crystals and amethyst,
my fingers like figs to slip under the tongue, I
pray they wake with the taste of iron and wine
in their mouths, wake to the pulsing of many
as one

hearing the marching, the flutes, violins, the drums
saying hold on tender beauties, dream another night
hold on tender beauties, for peace to take flight
no bars, no fires will burn our history down
we love like honey and move like moon-song sound
hold on tender beauties, it won't be long now

I pray the taste of iron and wine
be slipped under their tongues, to tell the tales
paved by figs and lilies, it has only just begun

sleep now in quartz caves and wake to crystal skies,
their bars are only limits, their laws a loose disguise

I know too the softest spaces, the petals, the moon, the dew
a fairy tale born within - garden palaces in full-bloom,
sleep now tender beauties, dream of rose caves and honeycombs
heart flute songs and our pulses dancing many,
many into one.