Darice Jones and Sarah Pizer-Bush

Sarah Pizer-Bush
“Together Not Alone”
Inspiration piece

Healing Time
By Darice Jones
Response

There is kind of healing that happens in solitude
Just you and the breath
Just you and the precious stone
Just you and the magical elixir
Just you and the burning bowl

Dig your toes in and hold your head back
Hear the songs that the V people sang
Before anyone was anyone

I swam deep down below the surface and learned to find the air in the water
I have touched the bottom of the sea
Built a comfy chair and sat there
Just to know that I had done the work
Of being myself
Of knowing who I am out in the cool, dark, beautiful obscurity
Of the ocean floor

And because I did that, I get to do this
To emerge into the land of many pleasures
And many pains
To do the other healing
One that matters just as much
One that can only be accomplished in the hands and eyes of another

Just you and they
Just you two and your precious stones
Just you two and your magical elixirs
Just you two and all your burning bowls

Dig your toes in, both of you together, and now hold your heads back
Hear the song of the Zo people, yet to come
After everyone is no one again

You’ll ascend, trying to catch your breath on the great heights of Mauna Kea
Find your other mind on the peaks of Ras Dashen
Lay echoes on future paths by reading scrolls buried under caves in Gniezno
Ask permission of your elders to set up shop along the ancient shrines of the first people’s of Zaire
Where the medicine is multi-generation, multi-dimensional, and free to those who allow real tears to flow

Whispers of COVID, SARS, or Yellow Fever
and none of them will matter when the Spirits call you into the first river
demanding you two together recount the wisdom on the walls of the Black liberators from Axum to Dahomey
until your healing is complete.

By Darice Marcella Jones

In the Year of Octavia Butler © 2022

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