AIMEE TACON

Language is a dance – it has rhythm, and movement.

Each word is a step across the room. We chart our course with one phrase and breathe life into the next. We make

pictures, and create –

patterns!

with our words, in how we arrange them. Staccato on the page, legato in the phrase – joy, even!

Letters as music notes and paragraphs as bars, a melody that can be found in the words should we let ourselves look for it.

Every language has its own arrangement, its own harmonies, its own tones.

Poetry is something that you cannot translate.

Oh, you can read it – you can translate and read it. But you cannot translate the music, the movement, the visual artistry of the verse.

Sometimes I imagine a world where I had been born to a different one.

Maybe I could have still been a writer, but –

I do not think I could be a poet in any language but this.

(Poetry can never be truly translated and yet in this – this exchanging of a smile and the softness of a blink, the brush of your arm and intonation of your laugh – I understand you perfectly).

golden petals on your cheek
they’re in your hair

you hold too much love
you have so much to share

your hugs are messy and warm
your smile is wide and bright

my sweet sunflower boy
you overflow with light

grow tall, reach the sky
yellow against blue

listen to the wind as it whispers:
“Sunflower Boy, I love you.”

What does love feel like?

It’s a feeling, a real, physical feeling.
I feel at home in their arms. When they touch me, I feel alive. I come alive.

It’s about being in relationship – connecting.
Knowing that I am here, and you are here with me, and we are here in this moment together.

Love is active.

Love is a verb.

Love is reaching, pouring yourself out for someone else and knowing that they will catch you.

Hold you.
Want you.
Touch you.

Touch you gently. Warmly. Holy and reverent.
Our body as an extension of self and our self outstretched, pleading to be seen and heard and felt.

Felt, with a hand covering a hand.
Felt, with a touch on the back.
Felt, with a hug from behind.
Felt, with a kiss on the shoulder.

When I was seventeen and I though the whole world would crash and burn around me, and panic pounded through my blood, louder than the thoughts in my head – my father came into my room.
He must have heard me.
And he didn’t say anything, not a word, but he held me until everything was quiet.
Quiet, except:
His heartbeat.
The light scratch of his skin against mine.
It set me off again, and I never told him why, but I couldn’t bear the thought that this feeling, this embrace, this love – might not be around forever.

That his heartbeat was a countdown.

But is it a countdown or a drum?
The heart, a physical thing, a symbol.

Funny, how it’s impossible to separate our body and this thing called love.

Love is the act of tearing yourself apart and rearranging the pieces in the shape that closest resembles them.

To love someone deeply, desperately, heartbreakingly – is to present yourself bleeding and bursting at the seams.

I think the Sun is an angel.

She told me so herself, as she offered up a secret kiss between cupped hands.

I believe her, because the longer I look, the more my eyes burn, and yet – I cannot look away.

I am the Moon and she exists in plane I cannot reach, no matter how desperately I try.

I watch her – quietly, fervently. I am not alone.

The Sun must belong to Leo, I think, as I watch its daughters race after her beauty, hands cast towards the sky.

I am just a shadow among them, following along with their giggles.

At least they can bask in her warmth.

Instead, I wait in prayer for twilight, when neither Sun nor Moon exist and we are only

two girls

suspended in time

looking up in wonder at frozen dewdrops.

Here, she can be the golden air I blow on my cold fingers, the fire that crackles at my feet.

Does the Moon ever look at the Sun like this?

Does it imagine how sweet she would taste, trembling beneath its fingers?

If I was to feel the full force of her smile, would I have to look away?

She has rendered me blind anyway. I have died and been reforged in the crucible of her desire, again and again.

Then, all of a sudden

a small movement

the crux

a change in the air

and it is over. I am unrecognisable to myself, a mirror once again – the Moon to her Sun.

She is so, so beautiful.

And she is far too bright to look at.