The cave where we grew secrets was a safe place; our memories couldn’t harvest us.
The glass beakers and vials held amalgamations of human tears, rainwater, bee pollen, and dust.
If pressed, unlike the alchemist, we would not give up our families, sell food for golden threads.
Unless there was excess vegetation unfurling from our hands, unless our families didn’t miss us.
There were many worlds within the world and outside of us, dimensions of sorrow.
To measure all of them might take eternity’s windfall, the knowledge of truculent stars.
At last sighting, the beloved had a mouthful of desert sand, trying to harbor time.
The sandstorm had rendered all golden kites useless, the pool of water a hallucination, in fact.
We sold our stories of the future to those who needed incentive to wake up, beliefs in magic.
By the fire at night against the backdrop of steady rain, we sang of fallen heroes who gave up their stories, bled out on stone, transformed almost everyone.
A chorus of thunder punctuated stanzas of bravery with the crescendo of dangerous refrains.
Hurry now, braid the wind with fire and hail, the thunder with courage and kindness.
Love was a camel in the desert dreaming of rain, a candle of wax for lighting ways out of dark labyrinths we created.
In the cave, our secrets grew white lilies teeming from our eyes, prayers even staunch atheists half-believed.
It was still a dark time, but our stories of the future set birds alight into new skies missing from contemporary maps.
The stories became us, pages in a book we would sell for more bee nectar, more rain.
Once there was a golden camel that held a globe of nectar, a world of calm betrayal.
Once there was a boy who traded all his baseball cards for clarity.
A woman who looked in the mirror and became rain, a day that heralded parades.
Our families understood our search to cure the diseases of cities falling off the calendar.
Love was the gift that fell through our hands, nectar that might eradicate doubt and chaos.
The beloved sent postcards about weariness and loss, golden threads, and birds of travel.
Our secrets kept growing wings soaring into the future for children and magical kingdoms without time.
Even with us, the pillars of some worlds would crumble, some days would fold into themselves forever.
It was all we could do with the new sun crawling up the horizon, lilies blooming in our stomachs, teeming with more intricate stories of wind travel, miraculous birds.