Sara Berkeley has published three collections of poetry: Penn (1986), Home-Movie Nights (1989), and Facts About Water (1994). They were published in Ireland, the UK and Canada. She has also published a collection of short stories, The Swimmer in the Deep Blue Dream and, most recently, a novel, Shadowing Hannah (1999). She was born in 1967, grew up in Dublin and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Being in the cave before time
I caught a glimmer of you on the wet walls,
lit with a triple wick, wax going up in smoke,
and I sketched you with the burnt end of my stick.
This was before time,
before your name, or mine,
our dwelling, the bed of stone.
It was all I knew at the start,
the blunt stick and charcoal likeness in the rock.
I was in a primitive place, grey with some yellow,
loving the honest light of day
and the bluer light that came so late,
streaming in the yawn of the cave,
old moon, stepping on stones,
folding your long form on the glistening slate.
One night the moon tripped.
I stood in the teeming space with sharpened breath,
dark and medicine, medicine and dark,
reaching out with my eager hands
I brushed against you on your rocking stone,
you caught a hand, all thumbs, and traced the scars,
you sighed because it was warm,
you'd thought me cold, so still in my waiting,
and I let your touch cool my weather veins
and I let you press a greenstone in my palm,
turning and turning the amulet of calm
as the moon slid out her reddened eclipsed eye.
I could have lived like that in the dark.