A Dialogue in Twilight

 A Dialogue in the Twilight

A priestess of Egypt
dwelling in the vaults of pyramids in the sands,
covered from the crown of her
head to the smallest of the toes,
in her blood-red scarlet robes --
I saw her when it was the end of her day and the start of my night,
when both of us were awakened and watching
the rise of the Third Eye on the horizon of our sky.

She was sad, terribly sad,
and I was hurt, unspeakably hurt:
hurt, not harmed!
There was still some light streaking on our horizon,
and the hurt and the sadness and the gloom thereof
had made the sky murky and dark.

An abyss of aeons ripped us apart
She from the suffocating silence of the secrecy of the knowledge the pyramids held
and I from the wounds and scars I brought
from the endless comings and goings
through the narrow gates,
heavy with the burden of memories, good and bad,
stood in silence apart.

She held no answers, I no saga which would embed a question.
And we both knew, we were done with them long ago.
Yet in that twilight hour, as if out of a dream,
abstracted, we stood on the shore of Time,
both strangers, brought in that unpredicted hour
together to face our long-lost secrets of lives untold.

Except a silence, unfathomable to both,
we had no common language to sail across  on the winds of Time.
Soon the star at the peak
sank below the farthest rim,
and we spoke.

"What are we grieving over," we asked.
She threw her head back in a desperate bid,
"A priestess cannot bare the secret sorrows", she said.
They have to be deposited in the secret heart of the ancient pyramids for eternity to feed upon them and annihilate.
I was a consort to dead emperors as they lay buried in the vaults for eternity. I do not know  how to breathe.
I have forgotten the art of breathing."

She was breathless, but I was unrelenting.
I had to wrench her knowledge and make it my own,
before the sun went down behind the hills
and the landscape plunged in the dark.
I brought all the force of my will to dwell
on her heart of silence and secrecy.

She spoke, "It's cold, very cold, inside the vaults of time.
It is the heart of shining darkness, dazzling black,
where I dwelt all along.
Once a triple Goddess, wearing a tiara of light,
sacred and secret to the alchemy
of the pyramid of flesh and the light of the spirit,
I sealed the knowledge in those vaults.
Ethereally charged, my sacred potions
were delivered into the hands
of maidens divine.
When ritually ingested, they were
a source of prophecy,
the lucid inner eye, and divine ecstasy.
That was my source where I would fain return, if I could only glimpse back the forgotten path.
Centuries of abuse of my secret charm
have buried the memory of what I was.
There are sentries in the pyramid posted to guard
the secret paths to my inner chambers.
My lips are sealed, my language stolen
by emperors of darkness and lust.
You my child, you escaped the darkness long back;
and now in this small hour, stolen from the march of Time,
We stand here, facing our saga
over immeasurable spans of Time,
before the tide of darkness invades and swallows
our separate but fluid identities.
Your sores and wounds and scars
are not yet beyond the healing touch of love.
You, my child, go back to your place in time

 and move with tide of Time.
Farewell, I must go."