A homage to what moves through us from beyond.

Full Woman Born

Pain is a gateway

through which I birth myself.

I come here to this portal within to pray,

to press my ear as close as I can bare to that hurting

and to beseech the song that lies behind,

the glorious part of me that the world said I could not be,

and the part of me that listened,

the part that needed and did not receive,

the permission to be whole or loved,

raucous or infinitely gentle,

sexual, sensual,

alive and full,

powerful and expressed.

How many generations ago

did this prohibition come

to dwell within my cells?

So that now it is as though

some vast and incomprehensible energy

of primal freedom,

some raw and vital and powerful

embodiment of Woman,

has been packaged away

in this clumsy and bewildered container

of my own mortal flesh,

the unlived lifetimes bound and gagged,

caged and restrained like a wild thing denied,

the energy required to hold it there

an exhausting entreaty to smallness,

and yet so fierce the holding

so crippling the fear

of releasing that which has no face yet weeps,

she who has no mouth yet wails within

like a siren song,

drawing me ever closer to hear.

Wellspring

Like a wellspring you beckon me closer

with the tinkling chime of your birthing song.

And without apology your persistent beseeching,

as through my mouth and my eyes,

my hand and my heart you express,

my womb the surrogate for your song.

You use me as your instrument,

as I become like unto nothing

in the wake of the humble force of your creation.

And always you leave me changed,

as though it were me you were birthing after all.

And I am left grasping at the meaning

you have left behind in me,

instilling truth in the aftermath of your unforgiving passing,

my womb aquiver with the ripples of the after birth,

beckoning me closer to the beyond,

and fiercely, lovingly retrieving my wholeness

from the womb of the within.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Her Song of Restitution

Because I know that I am not yet

all that I was born to be,

I have made a choice

to walk myself back into my own shadow.

By it’s very nature, being a shadow,

it is a place where I am blind.

It is dark and dense and deeply veiled.

I feel the world slipping away

as my footsteps take me deeper in.

The lights and the music, the laughter and the touch,

the friends and companions have all fallen away

and I am now alone in the shadow with myself.

It is quiet here and I am afraid.

The shadow is full of energies that move me

in ways I have known all my days,

only masked by my longing for the light.

And in this place it sometimes feels

that every cell of my being is resonating

to the story that I am weak and wrong

and unworthy and small.

It itches and aches and smarts and revolts.

It heaves in me like great wild oceans of pain.

I am lost at sea.

But in this place I am relentlessly searching

for that one who knows I am in the shadows.

Whose great arms are big enough to reach around

amidst the pummeling waves,

with her night-vision and her instinct for love

and with those great arms, she scoops me up,

so small and afraid, my little one, alone.

And in the darkness,

she wraps me up in her bountiful breast,

and she softly keens to me,

her song of restitution.

and our tears become a cleansing river

to guide me home.

Lucy Pierce © 2013