Elk Woman, Gentle Born

Gentle Born, Ink on Paper

ELK WOMAN

Oh wise one, come near,

tender one, gentle born.

I am making a home for you here in my body.

So that it might be safe again for you to be seen.

Oh ancient one, small one,

dark and true.

You who sees in the darkness,

come home to the body,

live again upon the Earth,

for she loves you and weeps when you are gone from her.

I am making a home for you deep in my heart,

Elk woman, with antlers that reach to the stars,

and read the air,

and draw the dark fronds from the fertile ground, 

open me.

Dark one, gentle one,

don't take fright, return to me,

my little mother who sees,

ancient one of the old ways.

You who I must come in so very close to hear,

hold myself so exquisitely soft to feel,

shy one, so easily frightened.

I must make myself so very strong,

to hold that space so soft,

in which you might come to dwell, protected,

that I might hear your voice in all that I do,

that I might see with the eyes of your tender heart,

in all that I behold.

I must be your courage and your safety,

that you may stay soft,

and return to the forest of my heart.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

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.