How a Sun Forgives

Chalchiuhtlicue,
Our goddess of the jade skirt,
Our lady of living lakes,
Have your tears yet dried
In the light of the fifth sun?
When you governed the sky
As our cherished fourth sun,
Where did your love come from?
Bountiful, your compassion;
Boundless, your mercy;
Blessed, to be of your design.
You gods made us to worship,
But with you, to worship was to love.
We swam a watery world,
Thirsting only for your light,
Hungering only to adore.
Goddess, let me be clear:
I miss it. I miss you.

How challenging it must be,
To be divine.
Locked in the folds of eternity,
Cursed with a permanent nature.
Can you learn? Do you forget?
Or do you just sit with it all —
Is that where your kindness comes from?
The knowledge that we are who we are,
That we do what we do,
As we always have and we always will,
And you love us anyway?
Then why did you drown the world?
Then what made you stop crying?
Gods can be so jealous and petty,
Thinking your love was selfish,
Our reciprocity, merely mechanical
Like dolphins jumping for treats,
So they bullied you.
Doubted you. Smeared you.
Did you know they would?
Or can even the eternal be surprised,
And betrayed?

Huiztilopochtli,
The southern hummingbird,
The omen of war and dawn,
He does not ask us for kindness
But delights in our cruelty.
He promises the return of daylight,
If we promise him beating hearts.
Even the settler worships him in this way,
Granting in insensate sacrifice
The exposed,
The unsheltered,
The distinct,
The noncompliant.
They do not drive obsidian into chests
To recognize the weight of an offering,
To bear in one’s hands the gore of it.
They gift to the hummingbird
Corpses alone in the cold.
They gift with massacres as footnotes
And call it economics, the dismal science.
With each new day, I suppose
The dead must please the fifth sun
Whether or not one honors their sacrifice.
Could the god of war be as hungry
As slavering Cipactli,
The maw of maws and countless claws?
Does he taste the difference?

Chalchiuhtlicue,
How do you forgive us?
How do you forgive Huiztilopochtli
For fashioning worshippers as cruel as us?
My beloved goddess,
Do you too yearn for the sixth sun?
For a change, for an end,
For the humility of oblivion?
Maybe the settler’s poisons will summon
Mictlantecuhtli to govern an age of death,
But I pray for your refreshing return.
I contemplate how you abide in heaven,
Your forgiveness as fresh as lake-water,
Your salvation as vibrant as salmon,
And I pray I could be as gentle as you.