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.
