Wounded Wednesday Presents: A Paler Shade of Truth

The sweeping wind slices its way tenderly through the weeping willows’ tendril boughs

Like a paper knife carefully cutting out silhouettes into a kaleidoscope of broken shadows,

While the rubicund light bleeds in sun-drops through the jagged edges of the leaves

To where we repose entangled in our restlessness beneath the shelter of the trees.

As the reddening sunset sky drips across the surface of our glistening and naked skin,

We are ensorcelled by the lies we whisper to ourselves, in the innocence of our sin.

We imagine we are as unblemished as the first of God’s children in this Garden of Delight,

But we are absorbed in a world flushed with the rosy glow of the sun slipping out of sight–

In the final blush of a sanguine sky sinking into the violet tints of an imminent gloaming

We are unblinded by the darkness and can no longer keep ourselves from knowing.

The secrets we hid in brightness at the zenith of a sun too bright for us to face,

Are sharp on the tips of our tactile eyes, in the stinging honesty our fingers trace.

The proof is in the pain–more are the thorns than petals attached to every rose,

And in the dimming shade of sheltering willows wait the jaws of hungry wolves.

We see our bruises hewn across the midnight sky in a marbled nimbus of black and bluish hues–

And we part like clouds, the moon between us, illumining our wounded flesh in a paler shade of truth.

(Image courtesy of a session at Painting with A Twist )