A free-verse narrative poem engaging in reflection of passion, loss, and self.

Daughter of Heaven and Earth

Sands traverse oceans to envelop me within the coercion of a dream of Egypt as I search the turquoise of the medallion in my hands to match the gray-blue of his eyes.

Too long have I willed for him to sail the Atlantic, stride through the door, and sweep me from haunting this view of London.

But for now I am left to my own image and a pane, so I muster the meat of my palm within this sleeve of lace to brush it across the glass for a clearer look, yet my efforts have revealed no more than engorged eyelids reflected…

manacles of me.

Behest of self, maniacal I am slated to perform involuntary tedium, hopeful to unlock deeper meaning within each hieroglyph, once so purposefully etched in a semblance of bronze.

I long to surrender to the warmth of the taste of iron caught in his sights over a tomb blanketed in gold.

I will come for you, Daughter of Heaven and Earth.

Spontaneous peristalsis of phrase connects with the drop gurgling through the candid quiet and I wonder if the image that now reflects would indulge him, or if he might fondle the lock of raven that he cropped from my neck with the skill of an assassin when our paths first crossed in Cairo.

Time has softened the image I hold of him; his eyes are satin, burning like a flag still waving as his army advances over our forbidden dig.

There is something sensation-like in downfall… copious saline embodies the fractal curve.

I found no scrolls nor the Book of the Dead.

Here in my olive skin I rot like a peach that’s been left in a satchel forgotten to dust of the ages disturbed by picks and axes that strike with the determination of discovery.

A peach, never to be savored; never to nourish or to pleasure, or be trampled by feelers and carried off in pieces to the hollow of the ant queen.

My eyelids are hard to turn like wet pages, forced to envision a river that is no Nile where I am held within the binds of propriety, corsetted, bustled, and locked out of Egypt dammed from the salvation of an intermittent Dutchman’s finger by dunes and shores and footfalls to find words that stream in liquid resonance where firm succumbs to self and

I can feel passion writhing through my intangibles.

Clouds form over a city that blackens and distorts the way a river’s reflection of my face would ripple from the plunging body of a dove, belly-up, encased in wings, and two thousand miles from him.

Arousal is a moccasin seethed in spasms of peristalsis and underbelly toward the beckoning pulse of breast.

Any hope for contact collapses into flesh, venom sheathes each corpuscle, and a woken neck flails in judgment before the truth in his eyes blackens the shadows of pyramids where Ramses II lies supine across the Turin Papyrus.

I imagine the other side of me and where she might reflect when all that there is in such a study contributes to my wanting to wreak my bellied freedom beneath crevices that sink as crevices do in downward angled layers to withstand the ages.

Dark hair gleams in contrast, more for strip of scalp than the trickle of red down my back.

Breached like sugar that candid — starburst wings of Monarchs dripping ancient like sunsets over magenta and milky mauve in the reeds — my ankles revealed and inverted to the sky they glean, yet… his arrival is delayed when the pistol cocks three times.

The still of my breast compounds with the steady union of the dank, and somewhere denial flows with the sands.

So cycles change, like a fable for Eternal.

Versions of “Daughter of Heaven and Earth,” written by Dionne Charlet, appear in print in the anthology Louisiana Inklings as well as Cairo by Gaslight, the second anthology in the By Gaslight Series from New Orleans small press Black Tome Books. Books in the series include New Orleans by Gaslight (ISBN 9780615801186) and Cairo by Gaslight (ISBN 9781516961528) and feature poetry by Charlet, under the pseudonym Dionne Cherie.