The Gravity of Darkness

Uncoiling the shadows                     Lucy Pierce    

    

The Gravity of Darkness

Oh dark one,

how long must I be apprenticed to you?

The cycle of your shadow’s descent

is sometimes like unto drowning to me,

as though all the world but me

held the privilege of holding its face up to the sun

and although I walk amongst them

my heart is shrouded by the dark side of the moon.

My most loyal mistress

you lure me in to see

the true depth of the unknown wound

while all the others are at play,

to gently lap at the edges of the pain

pretending that we are going somewhere.

And it is as though it were two lives that I lived

simultaneously trying to be in the world,

the desperation of this longing to be sleek and honed,

clear and simple,

basking in the light of all creation,

and then the deep inward turning eye,

scrupulous and brutal.

The part of me that longs for the sun

resists drowning completely

in the other gravitational fore 

of my own darkness.

But to compete in the sun

is to know so agonizingly

of my own aching shadow lands

pulling me away always from the brink of the world,

as I stand on the edge of things,

alone and somehow dually unlived,

a slave to both worlds

and a child of none.

And I beg of you Dark One,

birth me,

birth me whole,

that my being might be as wide

as the star studded sky,

and straddle the all of me,

without apology,

the inner and outer,

the light and the dark.

I feel your great pelvis shudder

with the weight of me,

and I feel your earth shattering contractions

like I did that first time around.

Deliver me wholly unto you Dark Mother,

that you may eat the after-birth of me

and be sated,

that I may no longer shy from your face

but drink deeply from your breast

the rich river of your stories,

that I might also carry you with me

into the light,

into the radiant shining

of the ancient Other,

She of the sun,

with her undulating pelt of pleasure,

and the celebration of who we are

when we have birthed ourselves home,

no longer caring for pretence,

but alive to life,

the life of the self

and the life of the world,

seamlessly met.


Lucy Pierce © 2013