This is another blog serial. Ope.
When I came to know myself more I began to spend my days gathering that which my father provided to me. Oh how he loved to see my creations! The questions he would ask, and the tales I would tell. He knew they were only pebbles, and twigs, and blades of grass, for he had given them to me, but his smile beamed upon me, heavy and accepting, as I tried to convince him they were instead
creatures of the air. That they were instead puddles of sky.
I knew it would not last, could not. Though he doted on me, loosed flowers upon my brow and rushed sparkling streams across my feet, the night would always come and he was no longer mine.
She kept everything from me. Kept it where I could see not but reach.
It was easy for my mother to keep them complacent for she could easily encircle them all without taking from the other. My brothers were contented, my father appeased, and I tucked away into a dark corner. I wished to also play in her light but I was stubborn and refused. They could bask in it; I would instead borrow whatever strength my father left over for me until the moonlight would go.
A whole new world came to exist when my second brother, with his thick scales of near-black, began an interest in the mountain.
When our silver kin would leap from the cool waters to greet our mother, my brother would instead join me in the tidal pools, his eye always on the jutting majesty of the mountain behind. His life in the sea did not intentionally keep him from knowledge of the stone but when he looked upon it I could sense his longing for it, for all the time lost to the currents.
“How is it you have come to know our father so well where I have not?” he asked me one morning. He lounged beside me at the feet of the mountain, my legs floated in the water besides.
“I came to be upon his back.”
“And why do I, then, find myself in the sea?”
“Not within the sea,” I admonished. “Within the moonlight.”
“And yet here I am, without moonlight nor mountain.” He nodded to the mountain. I knew the look, I’d envisioned it upon my own face so many times when I longed to spread myself upon our father’s lap, to pull the strength of him within myself. “What is it like?”
There were not words for it, to know the denseness that held me day after day. To feel weight of earth beneath you. To want to know that power and be so readily upon it.
One day I had an idea.
“There is a lake,” I told him. “A few days hike, cradled within the peak.”
And there was. It was nourished from the streaming chill of ice that capped our father’s head, which trickled through his clever brain and took with it echoes of his wisdom. So often I had wanted to
swim within the water but I knew I could not for it would kill me. The shocking crispness of it, the substance of it. I was overwhelmed just seeing it, I knew that dipping myself beneath it would be my
end.
I needed the warmth.
I needed the air.
But, my brother was a fish.
“I can not,” he scoffed in anger. And I was embarrassed to show him my face at those words for suddenly I knew he could not, how could I make such a suggestion? I had seen how weak he became only a step from the shore, how his color drained away and his suppleness tightened in the damning warmth of the sun, for he could only attempt it in the day: If our mother were to see our transgression.
How we were so different, and yet the same, I never came to understand.
How we could both love and want the silverly light of our mother but only one of us could thrive within it.
How we could both yearn for the stability of our father but only one of us survive it.
Our father would shrug his questions away where mine were treated like music. It pained me to enjoy it. After all, it was not my brother’s fault that where the moon chose to hold him, the mountain held me.
“How can I be with you, Father?” my beautiful brother would ask. Our father would not answer, no matter the desperation. No matter how my brother flipped and thrummed against him. But my brother and I, neither of us needed to hear the words, they were as known as the day: Be more like the sleek silver of your kin. Bother me no more with this.
“There might be a way,” I whispered one morning, for mornings were for us.
“Tell me.”
This story, which I am breaking into an online serial to release every-other Saturday, is the original incarnation of my recently published poetry books My Mother, the Moonbeam and My Father, the Mountain. Posts related to each of those books are also included in this blog, offering additional information and insight to the poems. You can find more information on books, events, and the blog at http://www.faunalewiswrites.com
Fauna Lewis Writes 