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Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

High Priestess
by Sheikha A.

for Taleah

You hear a knock on your door;
through sleep-slit eyes you see

her in ancestral binds – bangle
on her arm – colour of arcane

dreams. You remember a cardinal
chirping, and a woman bald-eyed;

you remember her chest-less
coming towards you with intent.

She binds like Mobius strips –
what she wants is what she gets;

your mind feels like a lotus
pulled down by an anchor

in a pond you recall as bloodied,
the tinge of tar-like frothy ripples,

and her hand emerging
pedantic and instructing.

She is here to teach you to read;
you see your body become still

as her hand gently grips your wrist;
your body will stay behind – you travel

light – only the origin is permissible,
she tells you, her voice a hissing echo –

her voice like a thousand silent meteors
before a war-cry; you remember this dream,

and the end before which you’d wake.
She comes every ten moon cycles

when the candles have burnt
to their last fibre; she had you

leading in your past life
until you turned rogue,

your mind erased
cast back to the 3D;

you remember your soul
break auric fields of war-lords –

the witch that weakened battalions.
You watch your soul look back

at your body, your eyes meet
like predicting runes; you tell

yourself you will learn
what she commands

that this time will be different,
this time you will be gone for long.

Fiction © Copyright Sheikha A.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from author Sheikha A.:

Nyctophiliac Confessions:
Poems by Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee

“The night is cold enough to inspire poetry,” says Sheikha A. in her poem, “Reading My Bones.” This is the basis of Nyctophiliac Confessions – poems that are introspective and luminal, poems that require a certain amount of silence and space to be fully formed and appreciated. Reading these poems, I imagined that they were the kind of poems that assert themselves unbidden during a bout of insomnia. (A nyctophiliac being someone who loves the night or loves darkness).

Nyctophiliac Confessions is the 17th installment of Praxis’ chapbook series and contains twenty-six poems written by two poets, Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee, interspersed with abstract paintings by Robert Rhodes.

Available Here!

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