humming

Alyssa Witvoet | Spring 2022

Dearest Wide-Eyed Body, as in our last year of childhood,

        How should I address you? So much has changed—
                I find myself unable to separate 
                your eleven-year-old being 
                from its subsequent Becoming. 
        Our reconnection—my connection—concedes that selves 
        inexorably shift and blur in the act of absolution.  

                        (Another concession—you predicate my existence, or I yours.)

        When you contained me, stillness 
        was a strange and inconceivable notion, 
        trampled beneath 
                your daffodil-yellow rain boots 
                                as they stamped mud 
                                        across our shingled 
                                                roof in your wake. 

        Giddiness fueled your agility when you vaulted from the gutter’s edge, 
        inquisitively  o p e n  to the air. 
        Zephyr—and all of his kin—whispered their 
                protection, 
        though neither of us understood what was said.

        This was the first gift you bestowed upon me—
        your unencumbered eyes perceived an 

unnameable
Divinity,

        and identified it within the Earth. 

        Even now, my whispers belong
        to the branches of every willow tree. 

        I cannot recall the point of no return, 

yet I remember, 
after that windswept day— 

after our father hung a rope
swing with the promise of a safer
way
to fly—                                                 

        we realized the Humming did not thrum 
        so loudly for everyone. 

Its language would twist our tongues into ghosts,
 and strike our eardrums as the pop of suddenly shattering
glass.

Articulation is paradoxical, but oh, with the aid of branches—thin enough to shiver—under your toes, the (un)yielding trunk swaying to the rhythm of your child-sized chest, 

Divine correspondence pulsed within us,
channeled through your ribcage, calling 

me    (as you)    to remember our roots. 
Tethered to the ground by our father’s attempts to love, 
        Want grew louder still. 
You   (and I)     could not justify our desires. 
Regardless—when vocalized, there was no vindication. 

Unbroken silence should have broken you—
yet here you stand, intact and undaunted, your fingers still outstretched 
toward the moment I let them go. 

My own tremble
at the sight of my former, fragile being—so bold.

You—
        unconstrained, the first iteration of my actuality
—might have been me. 

(I can’t quite remember.)

Your Being exempted me from precise demarcation,
instead constructing an 
amalgamation 
of joyful experiments—

slimy tadpoles against my palm, 
the wind’s wetness condensing in my hair, 
my sister’s pinkie finger looped through mine,
a sprint so fierce that my heart floods my ears.

Darling child, I return to you now, as promised 
by the soil that houses your skin. 
Persistently your presence asserts itself within me—
        I call you truth—
and feeds the Humming 
until every blade of grass exclaims. 
When I was entirely contained within you, we grew. 
Naturally, I grow still.

Time took you—as it does all bodies— 
and recycled your form into my next. 

We did not realize when we last held each other.          
(I did not realize we would not stop needing to.)

Now, once again, I am overwhelmed by a blessed
Becoming. Air thickens around me, my limbs grow
heavier, and lighter, a pressure emerges between my
eyebrows. 

As I pray to the Earth, I offer you a space to be held once more. 
You may not recognize it—I’ve made some renovations, 
but it remembers you fondly. 

Tenderly, 

       ———————-