The Funeral Procession by Margaret Beaver

The mourners have gathered
with skulls and bones threaded from their ankles:
they cry like a daughter for the hot sun.

Slowly they move, as a horse drawing a cart.
Such wailing tears their cracked, dusted lips;
they would break their breast bones.

A moaning, disembodied, swirls the dust at their feet.
The mouths of these spirits rise, cavernous as the
mind, revealed by the sand of the wind.

A beautiful one, of skin black as night in the eye,
her face smoothed as clay in two hands,
grieves: the caressing Moon has betrayed her bed.

The rattle of the bones, the rattle of the bones:
in the mother's mind the child's sockets are rattling.
The sound is her madness.

The mother would die to but drown in her
daughter's hair, to but swallow her daughter's
dreams.

Feel the hooves along your sun bleached bones,
the hot breath in the dry channels of your marrow
saying Rise, O mad woman, rise.

Author bio:

Margaret Beaver is a student at Georgia State University. She is currently pursuing her Undergraduate degree in Psychology. Her work has been published at Counterexample Poetics and The Houston Literary Review. She has appeared on Vox Poetica's radio blog show "15 Minutes of Poetry." Her chapbook, "The Memory Speaks," is forthcoming from Victorian Violet Press.