Lyrics: Hannah Frances Pautler
Music: Hannah Frances Pautler
Living at the edges of rupture
I find solidity in the movement of roots
Wrangling up my legs and wrapping around my waist
The truth held steady in the nest between my lungs
I reach through limbic estuaries
Casting shadows along the entropy and chaos of memory
I reach to the limits of this tangled landscape
My body holds the history as a map
Disparate narratives, oscillations, aerial parts, and unrevealed roots
Fault lines
That were never my fault
Now I am standing clear in the abstractions, attachments, and complexities
I am fragmentary and whole at once
I am tender heart and jagged hand
I am a bird, and a stone, and a fragile bone
And I am here to listen
And love this child I have always been
To hear the torrent in my chest as a song I must sing
As a bright thing I have to offer to the space between
And as the sun seeps through the branches
I believe in the breakage as an opening, as a beginning
I believe there is a way through
I believe I can learn to trust again and again and again and again and again