Fear and Seeing Aura…

It Wasn’t Death She Saw
But life:
skin dancing with flesh
like silk curtains that swirl in the wind
above her mother’s window
up up now puff! and in again
Or breath – is the wind breathing?
She’d been playing in the grass when it happened:
the snake flung
from the mower’s blade, rainbows
of ribbons in the air
rainbows rainbows everywhere, catch a ribbon for your hair
She wrapped the pretty pieces in willow leaves and grass.
When she told her mother what she’d seen –
the way life
leapt out of the snake
just like a ballerina –
her mother beat her,
scrubbed her tongue with salt
but Mama, it was beautiful, like fireflies at night
She learned to hold her body
very still.
– Kirstin Hotelling Zona