The Rending

The path is carved in violence – steep, raw,
a jagged wound in the earth’s hide,
where stones lurch loose beneath the soles
of those who climb with tethered lungs,
chests tight with the burden of waiting.

Wind gnaws at the ridge, sour and sharp,
laced with peat and cypress silt,
spitting vinegar against cracked lips,
dragging at the shoulders, whispering down the spine:
Turn back.

Below, the valley sprawls, spent and bloated,
cane fields slumped like a broken slave,
silent but for the wind’s dry bleat,
a skirl, a keen warning, a taunt.

But the peak looms near, blackened and cruel,
where coal tar smothers the firmament,
where saints stand in their brittle faith,
watching, waiting, breaking.

Stillness, then. A pause so thick
it clots the sky, curdles the air,
a silence stretched to the edge of screaming
and then, it splits.

sheen – carmine, swollen, reckless-
guts the heavens, flays the dark,
a wound so deep the night recoils,
and everything that held is loosed.

The shackle snaps. The saints arise.
bedrock cracks, cane bows, rivers still.
And the voice that was only a murmur
now comes roaring through the void:

Maranatha. Maranatha.
The sky is torn.
We are home.