Eclipse Chimera
Art by Gina Ltherland, "To Each Her Chimera", 2004.
In the cloudy backwash of last weekend's full moon, strange creatures are emerging from the depths. As though the supersonic blasts of sun and moon, frequencies and fuckery, keep conspiring to dissolve the barriers to necessary change. Keep spotlighting what lies beneath the bluster and spin and all the bombs. Keep drumming not no mores into us so we have no choice but to shapeshift and alter. A torrenting dynamism that cannot be halted nor vaulted in this, our year of transformation.
Everywhere you look these creatura emerging like denizens of the fathomless deep, hallmarks of the long dead past, their lifeless claws only hanging on for your notice. They clatter just when you do. Their shadows stain the walls and scare you from sleeping. They howl in the quiet of the night keening a lament only you can hear. Repeated excision without so much as a by your leave merely emboldens them to dancing, sharp heels in your belly that shoot both ways along your spine. The channel pulses still with the blacksmith's chant only you know, antidote to their appetite for your life.
Slung over your shoulder in warm warning to their ancient sorcery is your chimera. Sometimes nestled in the crook of a leg thrown outside the safety of covers, at others prowling the margins of your life. Their distinct DNA is yours, restranded into the shape you take in the near future. Hardly recognisable but strangely familiar, beguiling you with come hither eyes. A kindred reweaving one shadow at a time into the tapestry of your life, tugging on what still frays and flaps in the wind. Knowing in the way only the parts of you that survive can. Courageous in the way only a warrior for their own life is. Stronger for having been broken, scar tissue shimmering like a testament. Resilience is an alchemy all of its own.
The eclipse horizon scents the season's end like a wildfire. The leap year day out of time is only two shakes of a lamb's tail away. Between then and now Mercury's pinwheel through the heart of the sun will give you new words to roll around in your mouth and then, lie in wait upon the tip of your chimera's tongue for the eclipse.
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2024