Poem: The Shard Of Past Lives by Katherine Givens

​The Shard Of Past Lives

By Katherine Givens
QuailBellMagazine.com

Soul wearied
from the bodies worn.
Past lives, past flesh,
shed through the centuries
in a search for belonging.
Sitting in caves by fires
burning low,
beasts painted onto the walls
by hands slashed and scarred.

Egyptian priestess standing
between the paws of the Sphynx,
waiting for riddles
to seethe through the sands.
Striding through white colonnades
as Socrates debates
the worlds of sense and thought.
Digging the dagger
into Caesar’s side,
dying alongside
sweet Cleopatra.
Shield maiden leaping into longships
on Viking raids,
dashing into Crusades
for God and religion.
Trapped in the London Tower
for a crime against the rightful king,
heir to the ruins
of a Venetian palazzo.
Standing on a ship bound
for the Americas with hope
for richer days. 
One of many muses for Byron,
courtesan for the French elite.
Empress of the Russian winters,
pauper in the streets of a city
fallen to tyrants.
Standing on a train platform
waving as husband leaves for war,
Jew hiding in the attics of Berlin.
Posing for Warhol’s next masterpiece,
disco queen
without the throne.
Skipping through the stream
of time,
into the skins given
by fate.
Soul stripped from one life
to the next,
never the same, never returned.
One to the other,
drifting through,
but missing the lands
these new eyes see
in photographs and books,
where memories flourish
in the unforgotten.