Graduation -13

I have an image that flits across my mind.
Sometimes it even stays, inside my heart, welling up through my veins
till I feel the yellow-dandylion glow inside my spirit
and I feel effervescent, scintillating...right.

The image is looking down on a girl, kinda like me, but not me...not yet.
She turns her face up to the sun, lifting her arms and palms and stretches...
a deep stretch that comes from the very muscles that connect to her ribs...and smiles.

As she feels the sun sparkle along the sensitive palms of her hands,
and gently caress her cheeks and her nose and her closed eyelids,
drawing a silent laugh from the breathing muscles,
a twinging, shuddering joy,
like a baby bird pushed out of the nest
finds that its wings catch an invisible hand, that lifts it...
so rises her heart, lifting through her chest and out as she opens her eyes...
and begins to dance.

As if her feet are no longer a part of the earth,
yet the gravitational pull of the solar body beneath her
begins to spin, so does she, arms stretched towards the sun
as if, like the phoenix, her wings might catch fire,
burning away the impurities of her soul, her mind, her memories...
her very being changing beneath the ever searching fingers of the sun,
as it dances, so does she, her own ellipse, within the cycle
of the Earth...and she remembers.

Her tears run freely, drying as fast as they fall,
years of weariness and wrong choices,
each drop, shed for the pain, the sorrow,
memories of standing in the doorway of her heart
watching another silhouette passes from it.

The light behind her, the light she had run from,
casting her shadow before her, a reaching grasping thing,
she stumbles, the hand of the sun seeming to weaken for a moment,
but the path she has chosen is one of light,
and she turns from the shadow, feeling the cold fingers
of her self, fade away from the death grip on her throat.

And she breathes, gasping once again,
but drawing in sunshine and clear air, bright and dry...

 As my vision fades, I find myself still sitting in the dark, tonight.
she and the sunshine retreat back to the part of my heart,
still fluttering in a quiet, earnest, vibrant hope,
often dampened but never truly silenced.

As I look toward the coming weeks
leading up to my mandatory expulsion from Academia...
My nature wants to run, fights the bit I've given it,
wings trimmed, hap-haphazardly, but I am walking
and waiting to run the path I can see but haven't reached yet.


And maybe, just maybe,when I get to where she is...
I will be ready to join her...ready to be free.