Magician's Wife

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

My hand meets yours
gently in the dark
like a sigh of relief, as if
our secret sorrows didn't matter now
that you have my hand.

With my other hand I hold
onto the blood-red skirt
of Divine Mother
red like
the rose of her cheeks
at dawn on mountain tops
or the fiery golden purple
veil of dusk;
the blood-red of
her evil-destroying fire.

The night shimmers
with the invisible pearly light
of a hope not far away but
just out of reach,
casting a luminous glow
on the pure white spring blossoms
growing in the dark,
and in the moment where
the only truth seems to be
to succumb and to suffer,
that hope is like a dream vision
brightening the dense darkness,
a duty that is a friend.