Still and Gently Listening

 Flowering woman         Lucy Pierce © 2013

Still and gently listening deeply within

to the tender turning of the tide,

the fine filaments swaying in the release

of an anciently withheld current,

announcing ripples of exquisitely infinitesimal

and unforetold change

through the landscape of the feeling field.

Condensing into clusters of exquisite agony,

grand crescendos of unlovedness within,

building only to find the place that yields,

bursting banks of the long held stories of separation,

surrendering the pain of who I thought I was

for something else,

equally unknowable and tenderly awkward,

and becoming the path to another forbearance

and yet another pooling of dark matter within.

Still, and darkly listening,

following the thread that is leading me home.

The brittle disintegration of paper-like encasements

deep in the body,

breaking through that which held energies separate,

that fragile membrane enough to withhold

the pulsing tides of life until now.

I dream of empty, untended rooms of my psyche,

newly discovered, dusty and barren

from a lifetime’s disinhabitance.

Thunderous, trembling transmutation,

blasting through the whimpering fear,

the trembling earthquake transfiguring

the landscape in its wake.

Staying awake in that which is numb

until that small constellation opens

and shaking off the drowsy unfeelingness,

aligns with that which is fully felt.

Feeling through the sheathes of that which I have denied,

shrouding my within,

like a mantle of protection that no longer serves.

I am re-mantling the body,

bringing myself home to the alter

of my own cellular inheritance,

restoring it’s abandoned places

it’s misused and neglected sanctuaries.

I am coming home,

hungry for wholeness and the task eternal.

Infinitely nuanced this seeking to reinstill

the nerve beneath the wound.

And yet the question sings,

rising like an air bubble through the deep and cloying mud,

displaced by my footstep on the riverbed of my being,

How can I come to lay my burden down?

My bones and muscles aching under the load of my darkness,

how can I unhitch the boulder that I wear

always on my shoulder, and be free?

And so I do as I have always done,

seek the space beneath,

tend the place between,

open on the inside,

as wide and as infinitely small as can be,

still, and gently listening,

least the answer to my question

be whispered softly in the night.

The tentative exploring of that space

where grace might dwell within me,

where God might sing within me.

Each hungry cell awake with the hunger

to be remembereded by love,

skin alert like a new-born babe,

or a body embalmed.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Recent Sculptures

Newborn Mother by Lucy Pierce © 2013

      Little Mother  by Lucy Pierce © 2013

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