A Familiar Solitude, Textiles, Metal and Stones, 9′ x 3′, 2017

A Familiar Solitude
by Heather Gentleman

It is a familiar solitude  

An agony of existence                                                                                                                         
A life wrenched out of a murky chaos                                                                                                
                                                                                                                               
In her dreams she follows a child who is tired and thirsty, down winding streets
She is covered in mud and carries the remnants of her past
in a Bell Jar

Her memory is a tyrant                                                                                                                         
Her lost childhood                                                                                                                              
Her severed hands                                                                                                                          
Her phantom limbs

She seeks shelter but has no home

Under the ceiling of oblivion she enters a cave
Her spirit is in tatters
She tightens the noose of lonely solitudes
And remembers the silence of her squandered songs 

She writes on a wall with one hand but the other brushes it aside
Riparare la sua casa                                                                                                                              The house is in ruins 

Deep in the mud
Her hands, her holy sacredness plant a seed
A thick husk
Its lips in the earth
The blackness of the soil joining the threads of her hands 

Terra sustenance : beauty, dark truth emerges                                                                                  
One in the darkness
Created in the blackness

The space in which it stands lies the destiny of the seed 

She places her silver glove in butterfly wings