Read Online A Love Letter from a Stray Moon by Jay Griffiths - Free Book Online Page A

the soul limping to its pedestrian Gethsemane?
    The fallen. I see these minds which no longer fly. The fallen. Bleak eyes in beakers at parties, in a disheartened tarting for a one-night sop to their loneliness.
    The fallen. A fascist priest, rifle to his shoulder in his own church tower, aiming at a nineteen-year-old anarchist. Christ Almighty, is this what Jesus died for?
    The fallen. The children constantly chided, the girls with their will overruled, boys with their spirits broken, aged eleven, putting on a suit and tie to go to the office of maths and double chemistry. They fall for it, fall in for life. In step. Hup two three four. The fallen who fell before they ever had a chance to rise. (Though some mornings, shaken awake for school, and still misty with sleep, they look strangely up and murmur: ‘ Mamá , why do I dream of flying?’)
    The fallen. The old man looking blankly back on the nothing-really of his life, the job done a bit badly, the money he chased which sparkled his mind is now got and hoarded, gathering dust in the attic. Sometimes all I can do is curse La Destina .
    The fallen. In the garden of the house next door, the beautiful beekeeper, her soul the colour of honey, her body humming with pregnancy, lives in the shed and her baby, coming too quickly, is born on the wayside. She alone of all of these looks up at the moon and laughs silver and glad, and she alone is unfallen, she is flying still.
    The people of Chiapas are falling into despair, victims of malnutrition and government-issue TB, crying for land and freedom, pulverised by poverty. ‘Money talks.’ But only the poor know what it says.
    The Chase Manhattan bank issues a report calling for the Mexican government to ‘eliminate the Zapatistas’. The armies of the state flood the Lacandon jungle to capture the leadership, particularly Marcos, that most wanted man in Mexico. The soldiers didn’t notice that the moon (the insurgent moon, rebel of the night, first exile of the cosmos) had climbed the ceiba tree, slung her hammock between two branches and scooped him up, holding him tight, saying, ‘you’re one of mine’— and all that the soldiers found of him was his pipe, still smoking and warm.

S till smoking and warm, the story is not ended, but the end is near. ‘I hope the exit is joyful,’ I said, for a messenger drawing a black angel flying up into the sky, ‘and I hope never to come back.’ But this death in this life is a death from which only more life can come. A different life, better, stronger and kinder, and I painted the Love Embrace of the Universe . I mother death into life, and life into death, my jingling skeleton got the giggles and fell off the bar stool, weeping hot and real tears.
    I can hear the ringing of the copper bowl in the hands of Txati, goddess of breast and grave, whose bowl contains the souls of the newly dead and from whose bowl life is fed. I can hear the bells, the golden bells, of Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the moon.
    When I died, they said he looked like a soul cut in two. He said of that day: ‘Too late now, I realised that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.’ As my cortège passed, my mourners sang: ‘ La Barca de Oro ’, the ship of gold. (In the accident, all those years ago, I was like an icon, shining with gold, and now again I am drenched in it.) ‘This is goodbye… you’ll never see me again, nor hear my songs, but the seas will overflow with my tears.’ Half-right and half-wrong. He did see me again. As I was being cremated, the heat of the furnace made my corpse sit bolt upright and my hair was in flames, a death-halo around my head, my face in the centre of a sunflower—this end which I had tried to scratch out with a knife but which came to me anyway. The seas will overflow with my tears—well, that bit was right, too right.
    My ashes maintained the shape of my bones