Newborn

Newborn

The mystical threshold of motherhood,

death and rebirth,

turning in towards that which repels us,

mothering the inner child, 

nursing the wound,

alongside the wonder,

allowing the breast to be a conduit

 for the cosmic river of milky love, 

nourishing us as it flows 

through the being to the ravenous mouth of the small one 

who wakes us up, 

as the activation of our milky love nourishes the stars in turn,

making the cosmos more beautiful,

mothering self and child, 

the two as one,

learning what it is that holds you 

as you hold other,

the excruciating death of becoming nothing 

but a conduit for creation, 

in service to love, 

the weight of the gift, 

the displacement of it,

the longing to bounce out 

and to have again what came before, 

what will come again after,

tears flowing rivers, 

healing the separation

of ourselves with source, 

the mother to her child, 

the child to her mother,

the self to the world,

the world to self,

dissolving into the transmutation,

making the world safe, 

by feeling it all and owning ourselves, 

the light and the dark, 

the giving and the withholding, 

the nourishing and the wounding, 

powerful work,

deep medicine work in the body of woman, 

flesh as magic, spirit as form, 

pain as becoming, surrender as arrival.

Psychically shielding the primal matrix from the world,

as life creates itself 

in the enduring trimester 

of our becoming earth bound 

with our babes, 

through our babes, 

and their still-tethered-to-the-spirit-world gaze.

Drinking, drinking, drinking 

in the divine mother Gaia's love,

we cannot survive this without her,

as we cradle the babe,

allowing ourselves to be the babe that is cradled, 

dying, being reborn, 

annihilated, retrieved, 

ecstasy, bliss,

terror, annihilation, 

tears, milk, blood,

love, grief, dislocation,

making whole, 

soothing the unmet child inside, 

returning to the cosmic womb, 

being rewoven into the miracle that is 

the embodied, sovereign, 

powerful, attuned mother

in this world that would scorn her.

Radical revolution of love and care,
transmuting in the cells,

driving in new roots, 

powerful work, becoming whole, 

and giving the child the opportunity 

to know herself as all things,  

always returning to love.

Image and text Lucy Pierce © 2017

You Beneath my Wings

Together

You Beneath my Wings

Everything I do is done with you beneath my wings,

nested in the curve of my feathered heart.

My two small ones, divine and outrageously human,

sticky handed and thick lashed,

smooth and bellied and infinitely soft,

with your powerful primal forces,

one minute a lullaby the next a storm,

as you ride the furious currents of your own becomings,

human, embodied , relational.

When I am humble,

I am gifted the chance of learning the universe anew,

seeing with eyes reclaimed by your innocence,

 I am gifted awe and the most tender workings of truth

in my innermost heart,

as you birth me back to wholeness.

What could be more pressing than this?

Nothing more true than this fierce intent to care,

to indwell the peaceful solution in each and every moment,

the way you unwittingly call me on my own withholding,

the way your innocence and expression

illuminates in me my own artifice,

my own investment in the outcome

that may not always be of service

to the asking of the moment.

Yet it is true I sometimes struggle

against the smallness that you ask of me,

with each step to stay small with you,

with the eye that will see the bug in the blossom

or the hole in your sock

or the answer to the riddles that you pose.

You call upon the part of me

that is happy for the washing of dishes to take an hour

and that by the end, the floor will be drenched

and two new dry outfits required.

The part that values the quality of the moment

over what is achieved,

the part that must accept

that often nothing gets done

except the growing of our inner lives.

Sometimes I feel your wings

stretching out above me as you soar out

into a future without me in it

and I grasp the magnitude of this work,

that with my body I have created something,

alive and vital that blessed be will outlive me,

that I birthed you into being

and that with each breath

I must bring my will to bear

in the task of your care.

That you ask of me always to find

a deeper resource of love within me,

that you ask me always to be more patient,

aware, present and awake

than I would ever have felt possible

in the moment before your asking.

As through my own inertia,

I enact my love,

as you ask of me in every moment

to overcome myself,

as you, my flesh and blood,

move beyond the edges of me,

and call for me to come after.

The potent weight of your hand in mine,

the wild tangle of your hair

when I have looked away from it too long,

the hungry clutch of you awake in the night,

the desperation of your need for comfort

and the fact that you will accept no less

than the all of me.

As you grow I grow.

And then there are the days when I look out at the world,

twinkling so brightly and moving so fast

and it is as though we live in a different universe,

ours the time of the turning planet

and the growing seed in the dark Earth,

the creeping season and the creaking forest....

The time span in which it appears

that despite a constant business,

nothing ever happens,

just this imperceptible transmutation,

amidst all the minute and unseen tasks

that ask for me to be like unto nothing.

Sometimes I forget that you are both so tender still,

tucked beneath my skirts,

so wholly dependent on me

in a way that I still sometimes find unimaginable,

the ask of that much surrender.

Sometimes I stride out into my life with bold abandon

and then am left with the quandary

of how to be more than one thing at once.

And sometimes I hear the great whispering Mother

telling me to be still, rest deep

and be the great mountain on whom my children can climb,

themselves oblivious to the possibility

that it could be any other way,

than this vast deep holding of the mother love,

as I wrestle beneath, in the constant dance of surrender,

to grow my heart, to grow my capacity to love

so that I can hold true to you,

the precious fruits of my womb,

my gifting to life

and the unfolding of our tomorrow.

Lucy Pierce © 2013