The daughters of Lilith condemned
To chance a gory laden death once again,
All the while, standing vilified as they
Who wear the mantle of Lilith’s power have always been.
Tomorrow and all tomorrows after,
The daughters of Lilith will rise
With the glory and power of their mother,
Breaking the chains men make
Seeking to steal the power of Lilith residing in her daughters
Thus, breaking their spirits to subservient acquiesce.
But each of Lilith’s daughters will remind
Such fearful little men
Their mother was made before Eve
And fashioned of the earth as well.
With ramshackle shards
Of heart, soul, self
Falling away like the browned petals
Of a long-wilted bouquet,
We create a riotous noise
In ramshackle attempts
To find some connection.
Lumbering, awkward attempts
At reaching out to touch once again,
To replace, to freshen
The brown wilted and missing parts
With new bouquets of spring
Whose stems sit in eternally
Fresh, clean waters.
We dream of a life lived
No longer ramshackle,
With no long-wilted bouquets
Of a past to haunt with falling petals,
But a life returning whole,
To move without noise
Through the world once again.
What would I learn
Could I raise your bones
From the earth?
And like some ancient medicine woman
Scatter them like runes to read
Or use them in the making
Of a sacred instrument
To rattle next to my ear?
What would their music tell me?
Would their rhythms move me?
Would there be some wisdom spoken?
Hidden within the notes of rattled rhythms
Of all your dried out unearthed bones
Is there enough marrow left to have
All my ancestors speak to me?
Should I, in some ancient tribal ritual
Of ancestral cannibalism,
Ingest your ground bones
Mixed with magic into an elixir
Infused with your ancestral spirits,
Be given the power of thunder
And lightening that is your strength
Earned by you through the ages?
Is this how your spirits will travel through me
Teaching me of all the earth and sky?
Is there a way to know, to learn
To hear all the secrets you deem I need,
Need to know in this time, this place
For this, this last chapter
Of what I have left to me?
My ancestors, for I have wasted
Away pages and chapters,
Squandered decades of the anthology
You have written into me.
Ancestors, speak to me,
So I waste not the years
Left to be written
By your spirits into me.
She will never fall to earth again
After soaring among the stars,
The planets a blur. No.
No. She will never swim
In the deepest oceans,
Cavorting with dolphins and whales. No.
No. Never will her soul fly,
Brushing shoulders with angels,
Their wings touching upon her face. No.
No. Never these things.
Never these dangerous things again.
Never allowing illusions to gain sway. No.
No. She will plant her feet firmly in the ground.
Her heart cemented in her chest. Yes.
Yes. That once mighty waterfall
Has slowed to a trickle
As there no longer exist
Any waterfall wishes.
Marshal forces
Of the earth, moon, orbits of planets,
Laws of time,
All we hold mighty and true,
Stop everything in its tracks,
Turn it all back
Before the start of any of it,
Falling away,
Marshaled from memory.
I first wrote this a few years ago after reading Elizabeth Bishop’s work once again. Well, after revisiting Mary Oliver and gaining familiarity with Pablo Neruda this summer, I once again returned to Bishop’s work and then had to re-watch Reaching for the Moon. So I decided to dig this one out and tweak it and revise.
In this thing called losing,
Bishop said we become masters
And that losing isn’t a disaster.
No, not a disaster.
Losing socks and such stuff.
I’ve lost earrings, bracelets,
Expensive ones too, didn’t care
Beyond maybe a minute or two,
And never was it a disaster.
And no pain beyond a stab of nostalgia
Did I have upon saying goodbye
To three houses and two cities,
And never did I feel it a disaster.
And yes, it was no disaster
To bury my mother,
A father who really wasn’t,
The man who really was,
First one brother, then the other,
Then lastly, a wife.
With each, my body and soul
Savaged by a catastrophic hurricane, yes.
But no, no disaster.
No disaster is it, I’ll admit,
For a tiny bit of soul to erode
As I buried each.
But nothing, nothing did I ever master.
Except, maybe this—
I did not look for them-
Looking to forget them
Since they were gone,
Emptied of this earth.
No, I did not look to forget
While driving home
In darkness under a full moon
Lighted with regret
Of a new unfamiliar scent.
Yet the swirling of this sad scent
Is no, no real disaster.
No real disaster is it—
That I look to forget
A lost return now.
A return to life
Captured, fleeting, lost--
Filled with a scent
Of hope or a fool’s thought—
Matters not but now lost.
And in this thing
Called losing,
In which I am well-schooled,
As are we all,
I have tried to make an art,
To make an art of all this loss.
Yes, this may be no real disaster,
But Bishop lied.
There is no art in losing,
No art at all,
That I can find to master.
The feel of some bold mystic chaos
Contained within the fire of kisses
Traveling along the boundaries
Where lived an identity
You lost long ago—
To feel that chaotic fire
Burn away the identity
You wear today—
Feel passionate softness
Twist within and around
Leaving bruises unseen
And you undone
In twisting mystic
Chaos of fire.
Haunting seen
In darkening clouds
Of chrysalis dreams
Where wanting,
Where desiring,
Haunt seen
Cease existing--
In this capturing
No ring
pierced through
Butterfly wings
Dripping still
From newly emerging
Dreams not tended.
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