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Katie Chatham

Words for Love or Death

'Ouroboros'


Death is near.

you can feel it in the tearing of your skin.

cracks run through you and flesh begins to fall bit by bit,

you’re dying.


Love is near.

it is in the silence of the in-between,

in the ghost of what has been and the glimmer of what is to come,

you’re growing


suspended between horror and hope,

between the worlds of old and new,

between the decay of what once was 

and the tenderness of what is emerging.


you wait as the spent flesh falls from your body,

not tearing it prematurely.

it is a primal knowing

to sit in the discomfort.

to make room for the new when it is time.


Death approaches

holding Love’s hand,

a signal for new life forming.


they are the gifts laid at our feet by mother nature Herself.

they protect us from a life unchanged, a life unlived.

they are the tale as old as time.

they are the beginning and end.

they are hope, for a full life of infinite possibility. 



Love or Death, oil on canvas, 36" x 36"




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