THE DEEP ONES

By Bryan Thao Worra

Bryan Thao Worra is an award-winning Lao American author whose work has appeared in Illumen, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Tales of the Unanticipated, Mad Poets of Terra, Historical Lovecraft, Innsmouth Free Press, and G-Fan. His books include On the Other Side of the Eye, BARROW, Winter Ink, and the Tuk-Tuk Diaries: My Dinner with Cluster Bombs. You can visit him online at: http://thaoworra.blogspot.com.

From the sea we come,

From the sea we come,

Our mouths, the inns of the world

The salt of the earth unwelcome

At the tables and charts of

Explorers who expect:

Commodity and pliant territory.

Kingdoms, not wisdom.

Blood, not heavens children.

We grow with uncertain immortality

At the edge not made for man,

Bending, curving, humming cosmic

Awake and alien,

Our mass a dark and foaming mask,

A bed of enigma to certain eyes.

One with the moon,

One with the stars,

One with the ash that whispers history

In the same breath as myth and gods

Whose great backs yawn before us,

As we change with a growing tongue

Growling amid the dreamlands.

We built one blade, one leaf, one golden wall at a time.