Amaranthine (Blackberry time)
August loops through me
Every year as my most intimate
reminder of amaranthine
As if I am threaded by non linear time
Where some may mark this month
As rushing forth into fall
With back to school prepping,
end-of-Summer frenzy of travel
Remembering taxes dues,
Shopping sales, car maintenance
dentist appointments
August arrives for me
Like gushing blackberries abundant return—
the sweetest swell of thorny sting slides jaggedly, viscerally through me—
a blast of inside out grief
Only a bereaved parent could sense
Sown into bones, still walking the earth
Yet each step awake to the ephemeral
Swimming in lungs, still breathing
each inhale sucking the shared space of longing, each exhale immersed in universal belonging
Oh how loss un-ties,
un-dies our hearts open,
Oh how love shows us the purple face of blackberry time,
Of Amaranthine, the glow of mystical connection beyond our private suffering
Oh how the most intimate separation of body to body, of skin to skin—
The separation of a mother from her deceased child
the most holy horrible crucible to bare
Changes the structure of living in a body…
As the cells of each heart muscle beat rhythmically
never seeking, never seeing, never syncopating themselves in separation
As the alveoli in the lungs open in unison to accept oxygen into blood
As the nerve cells sing the impulse to be alive in infinite tethered pathways
My mothers body now lives in expansion with the beyond self, seen and unseen
A body awareness of immortality in the impermanence
every cell replaced,
Yet every cell connected to the Well of Life
Amaranthine in my blood, blackberry time
colored by every breath from the trees,
flushed by every crimson tide of sea
How is it possible that my greatest suffering, my ultimate disintegration of union
Also holds the most power to dissolve the illusion of separation?
**in honor of the anniversary of my daughter Julia’s Lifetime August 8-August 28, 2002
“Amaranthine" primarily means undying or unfading, often used poetically to describe something eternal or immortal. It can also refer to the color amaranth, a dark reddish-purple. The word originates from the mythical amaranth flower, believed to never fade, and is also associated with the real plant genus Amaranthus.
