Chard deNiord: Where And How Blood Was Made

Her son’s dreadful bodies, buried by that mass, drenched the Earth

with streams of blood, and they say she warmed it to new life,

so that a trace of her children might remain, transforming it into

the shape of human beings. But these progeny also despising the

gods were savage, violent, and eager for slaughter, so that you might

know they were born from blood.  

Ovid

In a sea beneath a sea without a name

where waters gathered to a clarity

that was also sorrow. There, in the darkness

that thickened in a dream at the center

of nothing, a scarlet serum formed

with hypostatic stuff in a centrifuge

of gelid currents that flowed in time

with the moon, the moon, back and forth,

until the mere idea of things themselves

suggested bodies and they were formed

as germs at first before becoming flies

and worms and flesh, never mind the eons

that turned to seconds in retrospect

inside the heads of those whose brains

were seeds for minds, whose thoughts

progressed in a garden where innocence

died and beauty was born: salt sorrow

red lust   stars betrayal difference depth

grief violence awe trust   charge order

rage dust   chaos sky fear gush

life stain sea death   flooded their hearts

that hardened to stone at the taste of it.