School of the Dead

For this week's prompt, we were to write a faux translation.  I stated with Vallejo and somehow ended with Helene Cixous Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. This is one of those haunting books, we have the privilege to read just a few times in our lives.  I first read Cixous when I was on the precipice of becoming a writer.  Or of listening to myself enough to realize I wasn't going to be anything but a writer.  Reading her again today, is both haunting and luxurious.  Here is my attempt at faux translating Cixous:

School of the Dead

A passage way between two jagged shores 
Dark water is dark because it holds more
oxygen   There are two ways to clamber 
downward:  plunge deep in
to earth or forgive your air to the sea.  
They say truth is down below with the dead 
– weighed down by what we've let ourselves forget.

We are a storm of living particles –
fireflies that aim to light dead static
of air.  So when the ash falls it is
deafening. To be human, you must first
lose your world.  The way the sea will wash 
you out of stance and breath. The unknown waits.