light dances like a dress inside the orchard ruins: 
you say this was someone’s body 

once. how we pray, like the woman
who walked in the city barefoot, 

how we forget her face but not her holy feet—
nothing survives the ordeal of language 

but like the moon these moments
need a place. I cannot explain how your skin 

becomes the laundry-water left blue
by the tint of your cornflower dress. how 

your voice becomes bread but I do not become
voracious. your pulse that creaks 

like a church gate. your heart, a ruined piano. 
when we make love we become a song 

haunted by its own sound (we cannot
live without forgiveness). how we pray. 

like a gardener who abandons his orchard, 
how we pray beneath his maples growing 

in a memory, our hands gloved in light. how.

Triin Paja is an Estonian living in a small village in rural Estonia. She writes in various cities, countries, forests, fields, riverbeds. She's interested in silence, plants, moths, and travelling.