Caduceus

I will call my own name, sing my own song,
each half of me declares, both Dragon and Worm,
when I reach into my wound to awaken
the blazing fire and thin ice sleeping there.

Dragon challenges the sunset knights to find
its soft belly in its thunder voice and fire-fed
melody of steel against stone teeth and lightning
breath: I challenge you to slay me, outdo me,
or shut up and listen to my cacophony
amid refrains of my captive virgins
chanting their anthems of loneliness.

But rain calls Worm from the morning mud
to sing canticles of pebbles and sand,
to burrow beneath the earth, to spin,
unnoticed, the silken chord that binds
the stars together in the woven universe
of quiet, as violin slim as the rain or
the yawn of rosebuds pulling toward
bloom or the song of cracking cocoons
hatching butterflies into eternities.

This is harmony, this epithalamium of steel
and silk, this song of Dragon and Worm climbing
tandem in a healing duet up the wand of life.

-Kitty Yanson