A Tribute to the artistry of Ekaterina Shelohova
She stood where the pine-line breaks
and the wind comes limping home.
Face streaked with coal and rainwater,
hair thick with nettles and beads,
singing.
Not to you.
Not for forbearance.
A low hum began in the soil –
not music, not storm,
but so
mething older:
the throat of the earth coughing up its curse,
and she answered
with a note so clean
it split glaciers and sanity alike.
Bones remembered it.
Crows tilted their heads and waited.
When she raised her hand,
the air turned to hammered iron.
Men forgot their names,
and even the dogs stopped howling,
as if the moon itself
had been asked to kneel.
She did not ask for consent.
Her voice could command an army to lay down their swords,
and with their last groan,
praise the hoof from her horse
as it trod their bodies into wine.
There were feathers in her braids –
not decoration.
Trophies.
A raven’s black, a gull’s white,
a red one that looked dipped in ruin.
Ave, Ave,
came the high keen.
Not a greeting.
A tolling.
A sentence passed.
Her tongue tasted of salt
and something metallic –
not blood,
but the idea of blood.
Like she might bite
for the music of it.
For the way you flinch.
She sang a note that felt like teeth.
Not on skin.
On memory.
Men with callused hands forgot their grip.
One knelt.
Another wept.
A third tried to run
but forgot which way was away.
Her laugh-
if you could call it that –
was a wet sound,
like birch bark ripping.
She carried heat behind her eyes,
but not warmth.
More like what you’d find
inside a forge
if the blaze had gone feral
and learned your name.
Once,
she dragged a lover by his tongue
through a meadow of thorns
just to feel the tension snap
at the base of his spine.
She sang while he crawled.
He smiled.
She didn’t.
She sings low and you dream
of claws curling slow behind your ribs.
She sings high and you remember
every apology you never spoke
as if they might still save you.
She will not love you.
She will know you.
And that is worse.
Even her silences are sharp –
not absence,
bait.
The ground smoked where she walked.
Not flame-
just heat pulled from something buried.
Long ago.
And angry.
Her song bent like antlers
wide and wild,
then narrowed to a point
that could pierce
a silence.
You wanted to kiss her?
You fool.
That’s a jawbone charm at her throat,
not jewelry.
That’s a map of war
painted in vowels and sighs.
But still.
You stayed.
And when she sang muted,
so muted it bruised the dusk,
you wept into your own palms
and called it baptism.
O wild-born daughter,
half storm, half sculpture
sing again.
Split me clean
like bedrock
under frost.
Now-
rise.
Let your voice be cathedral and conflagration.
Let it lift like a falcon’s cry
cast through centuries of ash and longing.
Let the vowels spiral,
slow as smoke
from a shipwreck pyre.
Name the stars in your mother’s tongue.
Summon the dull insistence from the base of the mountain.
Sing us into forgetting
and back again.
Leave us ruined
in reverence.
Whole
only where we’ve cracked.
And never – never
the same.
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