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.

The pain is the edge of the knife blade,

between who I am told to be

and who I long to become,

I walk it like a tightrope dancer.

The pain is the eye of the needle

through which the cloth of me is sewn,

patched and pieced together

over the years of my own becoming

who I might truly be.

The cloth soaked and stained

with my tears and blood,

the juice of my sex

and the milk of my mother heart,

those rivers that will not be stemmed.

It is frayed and stretched

where I have gathered it so tightly around me

to hide from the world,

as though if I could I might make myself

invisible  to the eyes of others,

as I keen to the unfolding of my deeply hidden self.

Stilling the voice that would build the pyre

of my own persecution.

Beseeching the Mother within and the Father too,

to bare witness with full presence

to this agonizing birthing of self,

full woman born.

I long to feel the great ecstatic crowning

of my own emergence

and that first primal, vital breath of my full self

alive upon the earth.

And yet what remains

are these rhythmic contractions

of my own becoming,

seemingly as relentless as the surging

of the ocean’s tide,

rolling around like the ebb and flow

of the moon’s light,

the rise and fall of the seasons

and the mystical workings

of the inside of my womb.

What I hear is the relentless call to listen

at the gateway of my own searing,

to the parts of me still folded tight

in the caul of their own gestation,

as I slowly summon the courage

to say Yes to the all of me,

with the full throated song of my courage.

Until the day when

no matter what you think of me,

no matter how much my shining pokes at your own pain,

I will wear this patched together garment of my own making,

this birthing blanket that so many hands have tended,

and so many moons  and years

of laboring have engendered,

and I will wear it with the radiant pride

of this regal reclamation of the whole of me,

clean and sleek and as wondrously Other

and unapologetic

as a new-born babe.

Lucy Pierce © 2013