A dry season

Once, in a dry season, my body buried
a baby. Blast-
ocyte subsumed into common tissue,
the hope of fingernails and eyebrows and eardrums
disassembled into shards of non-bodies. (My own.)
My body churns up hopes of skeletons,
like the fields of Europe yield up their ivory and metallic pasts
here where I had hoped to birth a future.
Outside, the black horde shrieks angrily
of cheated nourishment, of failure,
where rags and faded hat and painted face
guard (or would have) the bounty of the land.
But it is a dry season without.
That stuffness is only material,
not sentient, not being – still,
held more promise of life than my inorganic self.
I weep tears of blood like the relic of a saint,
Immaculate though I seek the agony of a martyr.
My eyes rain salt on a land already barren.
I drowned the corpse in frenzied torrents of liquefied being;
One, two, ten, the thunderclouds come,
Bearing a thousand deaths that freeze
the heart in an instant of ecstatic anticipation,
in weeks of longing and waiting,
in the crimson sight of certainty —
The cruelty of drought and a womb that remains
parched, dry,
in this season
in this dry season.

I wrote this piece at the January writing group, during which we picked random passages out of books in Mark's room as starting lines for a piece of stream-of-consciousness writing. It's pretty much intact from the initial 8-minute timed writing - for interest's sake, I can post the original version later.

There are a few words in there that are troubling me:
... had hoped to birth a future
... the bounty of the land
... my inorganic self (reminds me, bizarrely, of My Chemical Romance - not what I was aiming for!)
... a thousand deaths that freeze / the heart

Suggestions? Comments?

It's bleak and eloquent at the same time. I especially liked this ending.
Thanks for sharing Victoria.

A quick suggestion, purely based on my own sensibility (recommended to ignore):

I drowned the corpse in frenzied torrents of liquefied being;

One, two, ten, the thunderclouds come,
Bearing a thousand deaths that freeze
the heart in an instant of ecstatic anticipation,

The progression of the images here seem unnecessarily hard to follow. Could be that freeze abstracts too much? I usually associate thunderclouds with wetness and noise. Maybe you can introduce a thousand death before the storm? Just a thought.

Would like to comment on the structure of the poem as well, but have no intelligent suggestions. As of yet.

I like the themes and the tone, but I'm not keen on the vehicle---phrases like "tears of blood" seem a bit too used to take seriously. Kind of like how if you call someone a "nefarious villain", you will get a chuckle before you send shivers down a person's spine. If you get to editing this, perhaps consider reworking some of the diction. Being the clever and intelligent woman you are, I'm sure it won't be much of a problem, since this is what comes out of you in a mere 8 minutes.

You're quite right, Brian. I suddenly thought of the villain in Casino Royale, which was not at all the image I was trying to achieve.

Now I want to give a Frankenstein-like cackle as I reinvent this monster. (When I say Frankenstein, I'm thinking more of Rocky Horror Picture Show than Mary Shelley.)