things to do if you are the air
Poem - by Sarah Berti
Be invisible.
Secretly infiltrate the inner branches
of a gazelle's alveoli so it leaps from
grassland to sky.
Tickle the tree-leaves just enough
so they shiver with delight.
Kite-play with the kid at recess.
Unite the hot and cold aspects
of yourself to genesize
a really bad-ass thunderstorm.
Investigate lung capacities:
Take all ten sextillion atoms
required for an average breath
and voyage through the trachea
of a girl while she's about to recite
a spoken word poem to her classmates.
Enter through her nostril, inflate the lung,
and in the mouth, play with the tongue.
Caress the larynx to create sound.
As you exit via her lips,
handle her voice to shape
the flow of ferocious air,
so that after she enchants
like a wordwych whispering wind,
her classmates will have heard
the perfect Word
that you became.
Then, twenty thousand times a day,
penetrate another body via the breath.
Visit all seven billion humans on earth.
Enter every species in every biosphere.
Circulate yourself until
every breath we inhale contains a quadrillion
atoms shared by every other human and
creature not only now,
but through all of time.
Be our wind-songs, divulge our stories,
tell the tales of the untold through
our trembling mouth-pieces,
all the while having known all of us
all the while having united all of us
without our knowing.
Be invisible. Do not speak.
Let us speak you.
