Vigil of the Ages

I have been waiting for all my life.

I wait for the peach that never ripens, the wine that never sets, the lover that never returns. I wait for Persephone to step out from the Underworld, for Demeter’s hand to paint the earth green. I sit in hospitals and train stations, courtrooms and temples. I look for the dove that flies after forty days of flood.

I wait for nine months, belly swelling with the promise of new life. I wait for my daughters to carry daughters, my sons to cradle sons. I wander through fourteen years of exile swallowed by the forest night, and I crouch on the hills of Kurukshetra, frozen in stillness before the conch shells blare and the air splits with the flight of the first arrow. I rest on the fingertips of soldiers writing letters that will never arrive.

I wait with the farmer for rains that do not fall, and with the fisherman who casts his net into a sea emptied by strangers’ trawlers. I search the Nile for Osiris’s scattered bones, and I stalk my wounded prey for days before it collapses. I pray twenty-five years for the son of promise, and forty more stumbling through deserts of shifting sand, grabbing manna that falls like snowflakes and following pillars of cloud and flame. I wait on the ash heap; or in the whale; or by the loom, weaving the days and unravelling the nights.

I wait for the magpies to weave their bridge across the sky, and once a year, I walk upon a trembling arc of wings to reunite with my husband, our tears melting to sunlight, our love etched into stars. I fold the pages of my diary when my children come to visit, and two hundred and seventy-nine days pass before I can crease another leaf of paper. I chant the Epic of Sundiata until the lion child learns to walk, and I circle stupas under the fading twilight. I sit beneath the Bodhi tree, watching each leaf loosen its grip. I watch the uncertain horizon, yearning for my wayward son. 

I whisper to Joan in her cell, to Mandela in his, to every prisoner who has scratched time into stone. I march in Selma across a trembling bridge, in Berlin when walls begin to crumble, in Tiananmen where the streets have been washed red. I defer Nirvana until all can follow, and I rest in Limbo, awaiting the final judgment.

I wait fast, like lightning clenched in clouds. I wait slow, like a stone smoothing itself against the tide. I am called love and virtue; I am called spite and revenge. I am older than your scriptures and younger than your breath. 

I have waited at the gates of cities before they fell to fire and on battlefields before the blades can drop. My lovers have turned into strangers, my kingdoms crumbled to ash. I have been jailed and beaten, raped and crucified. I am witness, instrument, and consequence; I am the measure of time’s merciless hand.

No longer does ignorance blind me from poor fate, and no longer does innocence protect me from hateful desire. And yet, if I do not wait, seeds may never crack through soil, prisoners may never see another dawn, the exiled may never return. Mothers may never hold their lost children, and lovers may never touch again. Time has stripped me of innocence and draped me in despair, but it has not stolen my most precious possession. Hope is my last gift. Foolish, fragile, burning even in the rain, it keeps me alive.

I have been waiting for all my life, and I will wait for the rest of it.