Pandora's Box

I come to my bed late in the night

and slip into the space that you,

my youngest daughter,

have already found your way to,

plump and round and perfect

and smelling as only you do.

As I lay my body down beside you

you stir from your slumber

and cry out from your dreaming,

in your round two-year-old tongue,

“Open it ! Open it Mumma!”

As I scoop you up in my arms

pulling you in close to my heart,

and we lie still again together,

I feel a great heavy lid

opening in my solar plexus

like a Pandora’s box,

summoned by your mysterious demand,

and precious jewels, turning and spilling

into my blood stream,

tumbling through the cells of my body

like a prayer awakened,

and again you stir

and again you cry out

“Open it Mumma, open it!

Open my mandjarin!”

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Her Abundant Heart and Honey Love

Her Abundant Heart

Honey Love

This is what it feels like,

when the Goddess awakens within me,

as I understand her to dwell in every woman,

when you have surrendered your hard defenses,

and I hold you in my arms, vulnerable at last,

finally weeping and courageous in your capacity to feel,

and from my human heart

such a holy river comes to flowing,

with a deep and potent honey love,

in wave upon succulent wave,

flooding and making moist

all the crevices of my being,

the eternally forth-coming pulse

of Her loving of you.

As  I hold you in my arms,

your body in this moment a universe of suffering,

it is this that She seeks to give to you,

through the singing of my heart,

and for as long as  this honey-love flows,

I will strive to find a way of showing you

that which She longs for you to receive.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Labyrinth

As I walk in to the centre I feel tired

as though I have been on this road

to the heart of me for millennia,

each step a stripping back of what is not truly me,

impatient and alive with expectations unmet.

Sometimes excruciating this stepping in,

to walk through the fire of my own burning,

and it is sometimes as though I were dying,

my belly a gaping maw inside

as I turn from my conditioned self

and bare witness to the screams of sabotage

calling me back to those who would have me stay

on the harried outside,

forever abiding by the needs of the other.

So that each footstep is an act of courage,

risking sanity and a world that would always look

how I've always known it to be…

and then all of a sudden,

like a great surprise I am home,

to have come at last to the centre

and to rejoice in the homecoming,

to the core that is the taproot beyond time,

no one else to ask the question of but me.

The moist juicy folds of this full hearted throne,

silent and listening at the great mouth of the universe….

And then to turn,

like the great grinding of a vast axis,

and move back into the world,

but now drinking within

from the font of her forever wisdom,

anchored now in the full weight of what I am

and grounded through the vast portal of the womb

into the gravity of the Earth,

my heart attuned to that celestial merkabah

and alive with feeling follicles

like a ripe fig turned inside out.

So that I am walking into the unknown life,

the unknown me.

Allowing myself to be born anew,

and alive to what the now would have me be.

How do I stay true to this ever deepening knowing

of where the centre lies

and how to move from there into the world,

sourced and true and full of my own selfhood.

And as I walk, bleeding, retracing my steps,

I can smell the blood of my previous passings,

the endless cycle, into myself and out again,

forever shedding, forever returning,

forever losing my way, forever coming home.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

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

A homage to what moves through us from beyond.

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.

Wellspring

Like a wellspring you beckon me closer

with the tinkling chime of your birthing song.

And without apology your persistent beseeching,

as through my mouth and my eyes,

my hand and my heart you express,

my womb the surrogate for your song.

You use me as your instrument,

as I become like unto nothing

in the wake of the humble force of your creation.

And always you leave me changed,

as though it were me you were birthing after all.

And I am left grasping at the meaning

you have left behind in me,

instilling truth in the aftermath of your unforgiving passing,

my womb aquiver with the ripples of the after birth,

beckoning me closer to the beyond,

and fiercely, lovingly retrieving my wholeness

from the womb of the within.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Her Song of Restitution

Because I know that I am not yet

all that I was born to be,

I have made a choice

to walk myself back into my own shadow.

By it’s very nature, being a shadow,

it is a place where I am blind.

It is dark and dense and deeply veiled.

I feel the world slipping away

as my footsteps take me deeper in.

The lights and the music, the laughter and the touch,

the friends and companions have all fallen away

and I am now alone in the shadow with myself.

It is quiet here and I am afraid.

The shadow is full of energies that move me

in ways I have known all my days,

only masked by my longing for the light.

And in this place it sometimes feels

that every cell of my being is resonating

to the story that I am weak and wrong

and unworthy and small.

It itches and aches and smarts and revolts.

It heaves in me like great wild oceans of pain.

I am lost at sea.

But in this place I am relentlessly searching

for that one who knows I am in the shadows.

Whose great arms are big enough to reach around

amidst the pummeling waves,

with her night-vision and her instinct for love

and with those great arms, she scoops me up,

so small and afraid, my little one, alone.

And in the darkness,

she wraps me up in her bountiful breast,

and she softly keens to me,

her song of restitution.

and our tears become a cleansing river

to guide me home.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Taken

I long for your hunger

to reach in and take me,

awaken me to your heart,

like when you wake in the night

and like a lone traveler in the desert

or a voyager lost at sea

and with unmediated instinct,

you turn and reach out

and take me

as though I were a ripe piece of fruit,

fresh from the tree

and without a word you quench

your parched mouth

at the nape of my neck,

drawing forth the hidden meaning of me

and calling me home to you

as with the full breadth of your hands

you wrap the cusp of my haunches

and drink deeply of me

and I am taken so exquisitely beyond

my own resistance to your love.

In an instance you strip from me

the farce of my withholding

and in that moment I come to know myself

as the long cool drink of the universe.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Spirit of Woman- Beheld

Beheld

Spirit of  Woman

Oh spirit of life,

bold spirit of woman,

it is time now,

for me to fearlessly behold my own beauty

and to tremble in the tender fragrance

of my own robust and irrepressible blooming,

to be the presence that sees,

that knows, that bows to beauty.

No longer the tremulous aching for the other,

the parched and barren waiting to be beheld.

My roots tap the quick of the endless source,

my branches seek the eternity of all that dwells beyond,

my wings arch out forever

and I am love, whole and true.

No longer the waiting to be received,

I receive myself.

I open and behold this radiant shining,

my heart a fruitful bounty bursting forth

it’s juicy red seeds upon the opened Earth.

My womb an eternal well of all that is becoming.

I am upright and proud

I have the profound courage to walk in my beauty

because it is my birthright.

Who am I to think that I might lack

a decipherable language of love,

as though I were mute and blind in the darkness.

It is time to truly behold the woman

and to allow each quivering footstep

to truly land upon the ground of my being,

that the world and the Earth and the heavens

may receive me,

the fragrant and fierce

and fecund and proud

beauty that is woman.

Lucy Pierce © 2013