Emily, if you'd just tell me where you left your body I'd go leave mine there to keep it company. I wouldn't need it anymore and we could leave them in some sunny place, half buried in warm sand, arms around each other under the afternoon sun. In a few centuries they'd be just a pile of dust feeding the desert roses and waiting for the springtime rain.
Then we could start our real life!
Christmas tree corpses stacked in the streets like plague victims. Bring out your dead! Rooms looking bare and empty where the strings of lights shone. The gifts all put to use or put away, the bright colored paper all gone now.
Just the grey light of winter, and a pearl colored sky that's thinking about snow.
(Joan Of Arc was born on January 6, 1412, in Domremy, France)
Everyone remembers the way you died, Joan, the smoke and the screaming and crowds laughing and jeering while your soul rose to heaven on clouds of black cinders. Everyone saw the weasly priest holding the crucifix before your face as the hay bales caught and the flames rose, telling you to pray to Jesus for forgiveness. He was the one who should ask forgiveness, he and all the monsters who crush human hearts and pick human wallets while claiming to know the will of God.
It's too bad nobody remembers that today is your birthday, Joan. They don't remember the little baby being carried into the stone chapel at Domremy on a frosty January morning to be christened. They never saw you at three years old, playing in the meadow in your linen smock, picking daisies and putting them in your hair. They didn't notice you at twelve, looking at your reflection in the mill pond and wondering what the son of the miller saw when he looked at you. I hope his heart skipped a beat when he saw you, and that years later, when he was an old man sitting in the sun outside his mill, he remembered the first love of his life.
