Clarity

Countless

called her Priestess.

Few indebted souls

knew her universal

name,

whispered like rain

blessing the agave’s desert,

harbored like the heart

of the dead man walking.

Revenants

dreamt it in restless fevers.

Gunslingers

called it when facing

their final draw.

Wanderers

knew it only as a feeling

when they turned east.

“Far from the creed,”

they’d realize

too late and hungry.

Before the serpentine curse

or the Unkindness,

she was an interloper,

bound to an otherworldly way.

Bizarre yet instinctive

that the nameless

had borrowed hers,

that the forgotten

hand carved it

in weathered chests,

that the winged preserved

every syllable.

Once, there was a girl

named Trace

for her destiny

of unearthing the truth.

With nothing left to lose,

she submitted

to the hungry valley

and her fatherly’s foolish creed.

There, she found her, enshrouded

in the shadow

of the Unkindness: loyal

companions.

“Clarity,” the daughterly

whispered,

gazing for the first time

into the third-eye

of the priestess,

foreseeing metamorphosis.

“Clarity,” she repeated,

handing over the gunslinger’s

long-departed heart,

foolishly chasing the legend

of rebirth.

“Clarity,” the gardener chanted,

trading a great grandmother’s

silver tooth

for her first piece.

“It will be agony,

but this is the only way,”

Clarity promised,

cradling the orphan

while blades erupted

from her fingertips and jaws.

Reckless it was to imagine

she could outfox

the creed

by becoming it.

Few knew the priestess’s

true name,

but the ones who did

were haunted by it.

Because worse than their haze

of antipathy

was deliverance

taunting just out of reach:

A raven,

turned serpent,

turned priestess,

shape-shifting seamlessly

like the tenebrous

cloud of her Unkindness.

And there is was:

the truth that countless hunted

and only one

traced back to origins.

Once there was a woman,

named Clarity

for her destiny

of freeing the foolish.

***

Hello, wanderer!

If you enjoyed this poem, you may like to read others in the Westward collection:

xoxo, for now,

-your friend, wandering