Nameless

There is power in a name

And I could break beneath the weight of mine

My name is an instruction every dead version of me failed to follow and every version yet to be could bring shame to

It means “praise the Lord” in the tongue of my forebears but is something my cognisant self could not bare to embody

Too pure, too empyrean for the truth of me which seeks to silently lie in an unmarked grave, in a grove heavy with shadow, where only the most audacious of rays dare illuminate and where only the nameless should rest, kept sacred and loved tenderly by darkness

I wish I were nameless as a song bird’s tune and just as impossible to know by heart. That way I can be carried in a living thing’s beating chest, kept quietly and dearly in its tiny throat, conjugated but once in its sweet voice, dedicated to all of creation and then lost to the boughs and the leaves of the trees

I wish I were nameless as the weapons that felled my ancestors’ enemies, held with nothing but purpose and employed to bring about fated ends to destined beginnings

I wish I were nameless as the sands which greet the tide and break the waves, never the same as before, perfect in impermanence

I wish, with all the truth in my heart, that I were nameless, unremembered, unsung, and made whole by that emptiness because the nameless do not need to be