Radiance

Often for me, images and writing lie dormant for a time, between conception and their birthing. For reasons beyond me, this image asked for it's time of birthing to be now, in this dark heart of winter, though she was conceived in the flaming heart of summer. Perhaps she has come to warm my cold bones and remind me that there is also that time of vitality and shining, that will come again.

Radiance by Lucy Pierce

The Sun

I hide from Him,

terrified that He will burn me.

In the cells of my body the story lives,

that He is predator, adversary

and that my only chance of survival is to protect myself,

to contract and hide,

from the warmth of His radiant love.

He did not flinch at my fear,

nor at my rejection of Him.

He kept on shining His love upon me,

as He has every day of my living life.

The playful humour of His fingers teased at me,

wooing me to peak out at Him 

from behind my defended shroud,

a white woman in a black country,

fair skin, fair game.

I hid until the only thing left for me to see

was how farcical my own withholding was.

Once I started looking, I discovered in myself,

the threads and tendrils of the pathways 

that know how to say YES

to say I surrender and I open to you, 

magnificent love.

And in the opening,

the bones of my ancestors yawned within me,

the millennia of stories of persecution and brutality, 

the lifetimes of being victim to distortion,

let go inside my clenched cells and danced out,

down the inside of my thighs,

thundering through my loins,

into the tender light of His radiant shining, 

burning themselves home to love,

making a pyre of my body.

And all through the long day I danced 

between my fear and my longing, 

until the earth beneath me, 

dry and brittle, 

stick and rock, 

ant and spider, 

dry eucalyptus leaves crunching, 

became a nest of the most exquisitely soft holding, 

as I let go and let go, 

as He shone His love down upon me,

so that the clouds dancing in the sky 

became an extension of the sensations 

of Eros within me, 

the pulsing undulations of cosmic love-making

between Earth and Sky,

and me caught between.

And I was home,

and forgiven,

and held in the purity of this love,

with all my relations,

beneath the great dome 

of His magnificent sky.

And every gust of wind a caress, 

a raucous passion

as I let the golden light shine in,

to cleanse and purify

to awaken and ignite,

to conceive and unite,

to know of His love in my bones

and to trust the direction of His shining,

to remember His ever-presence 

and to calibrate my inner experience of life

to the vastness of my own lovedness.

Such a glorious homecoming,

through which I am safer to be more of me,

to trust the masculine as a great force of love, 

more enduring than any distortion of man,

is to feel that life is an experience in which to thrive, 

not just survive,

as I open each and every cell of my body 

to be nourished by His fire. 

Prints and Cards of Radiance available through my Etsy site www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce

Text and image © Lucy Pierce 2017