For Casey, and the world you represent
by Céline Coderey
I entered that liquid world
and took a serpentine journey under the flesh, into the center
of me
where floating is drifting, seeking, living,
mirroring the shade of those white feathers;
where the eyes of a stranger are so familiar,
and scars cohabit with smiles;
where wood is shaped into a house, a canoe, a mask,
by their agile fingers and my imagination,
as copper skins smooth the clay, in-fusing into it, as a mutual caress;
where crocodiles are loved and feared, hunted, eaten, worshiped,
and currents and thunders play with little souls;
where fire never stops,…a cyclic commitment against forgetting,
to preserve one’s place, a say in the world.
And I remerged with the scar of a smile.
About the Author:
Céline Coderey is a Psychologist and Anthropologist by training and is currently appointed as Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. For the last thirteen years she has been working in Myanmar studying the plurality of healing practices existing there and issuing from Theravada Buddhism, divination, traditional medicine, alchemy, local spirits cults, etc. Céline is fascinated by languages and by what can or cannot be expressed through them.
