Of Rocks and Water

I was the old woman of stone and water.
Ready rocks becoming sand,
Slipping over time.
As I spiralled in I stepped out into the tide,
turning, back through the ages.
I spiralled in and became She at the centre.

At the Centre of all things,
watching the tide come in,
battered by storms,
I sat there for a million years,
An age,
A lifetime.
The white spirals became waves,
My blood drawn fast
and deep
down into the stone and earth,
The jagged hard rocks.
No gentle earth here,
these rocks want blood,
They cut deep.
There are no gentle tides,
these waves will dash you,
the storm is hard and wild.
There is only this:
The bare bones of the earth,
carved out by water.
There is only this:
A siege.
A battle between elements.

I will wear you down.
I will stand in your way.
It is into me you must flow.
I will form you.
I will hold you.
One to the other.
It is of wills.
They bare their teeth,
Like dogs against one another.
And yet it is as inextricable as an atom.
There is no space between.

Here,
at the beginning of me,
there is no sweetness,
no give.
There are bare and harsh truths.
Speak plain.
Be clear.
There is no human error.
Only this:
Say what you want or find yourself having what you don't.

I sat there for a million years.
I was a rock,
it was hard and uncomfortable.
The sea won in the end.
It washed me down to sand.
She has her way.
Primal, primal, primal,
and older than the dust of my bones.

I am that.

I walk out an old woman.
Crumpled and folded,
straightening up as I walk
back to the present time
unsure
and unsteady
It was liquid upon which I stepped.
Just a glimpse of myself at the centre.

Branwen

She is the colour of ripening wheat, the sweet golden gloaming from green to gold. At the tip of her turning, tilting back towards the earth. A bird in flight reaching its zenith and sailing on open wings towards the ground. She comes with the full moon, bringing the light; she is the light.

None more beautiful, her sorrow is that of the mother, for it is only as mothers we are truly made mortal, that we can truly know loss. The loss first of ourselves, of the identity we have built, however fragile, around ourselves and the knowledge that if we lost this most precious thing then all else would be lost to us. The love we have for our children, weather they be born or not, weather they survive or don't, will dash our towers to the ground.

Branwen is the exhalation of the year, as the life breathes out, sighs out, and into the ether. She is amber resin, she is the key to the door, if not the door itself.

Poor tortured Branwen, the most beautiful soul ever seen. As tangible as life itself and always out of reach. Cut your hair, let it fall amongst the ripening wheat.

Branwens story is the most tragic, perhaps then she was the most mortal of all goddesses, she loved the most and lost the most of all. So beloved that we would stride an ocean just to be beside her.

White raven, on a dark, dark night. The wind in her feathers, flying high over the storm.  Sailing forth from the Ireland of the mighty, she was a pawn, exchanged not for love but power and to Ireland she was married.

But losing her son and then her brother broke her heart into four pieces.

Fathomless

The stars prick my skin, they sing in the synapses in my head and are the sound I have come to call silence over the years; the sound that the vicar ushered in on Sundays when my knees ached cold and I longed to be outside. I thought god was in the sky, I thought he spoke in the shades of blue and purple on warm summer nights with the windows thrown open, I thought he heard the whispers of my heart and loved me all the same.

But he was not the god that the vicar spoke of in his voice that cracked dry and parched as the bible he read from, not the god that separated the sinners from the saints. He was not the god of Sunday school that would send me to hell for lying just once. I heard about those gods and couldn’t bring myself to believe in them. He was my god, he wrapped his warm blanket of acceptance around me and I was never alone. He was like my grandfather who grew peas in his garden where the sun never stopped shining; made of kindness and a warm absent minded affection. He was some wordless mystery, a language I had known once but could not voice. I would talk to him and stare at the sky and feel as fathomless deep as I believed him to be, sharing our secrets, knowing that the other knew and that no one could touch that.

And whenever it was that I stopped talking to my god was when I stopped believing that I could be loved for no reason, in spite of everything, regardless and for free. Perhaps it came with the death of my grandfather and the sudden knowledge that there was a world outside my own that did not know or speak of these mysteries that lay just beneath the surface, invisible. It takes so much time to find them again when they are just there, glittering in silence and calling your name.

I do not know what my ancestors found in the sky but I think I can understand. I find silence there and it speaks volumes, it soothes me, it makes me forget my sorrow and remember, not joy, but peace. It makes me feel fathomless deep again and that there are words on the very tip of my tongue that I have forgotten how to say. That place that lies in between the high and the low is the voice of god, the goddess, the ones who still live in the place beyond words and know how to speak my name so that I hear it everywhere.

In between the words, in between the stop start rhythms of life, in between midnight and morning, in between my tears and my laughter there is peace, just peace and it’s what my soul has longed for all these years.

The next time I see my grandfather will be in the faces of my children who will be born wordless and still know the language of the gods. And I will watch them listening and wonder at how life cycles around.

The moonlight sweeps across your face

The moonlight sweeps across your face, silently, like some inaudible tide. She washes and washes at your boughs, at the lines of your strong features, carved deep, till it seems they are smoothed away, dissolved by sleep, and your face is the face of the moon.

Her tides have quietly carried you away. Sea dreamer, I wonder could I still count the times I have watched you like this on my fingers. Could I have mapped the course of this vessel in the lines on my hands, hands that trace your shadowed outline in the dark?

You breathe deep as if drawing me in and under the swirling warmth of sleep, but she does not come for me, does not claim me as she has claimed you. And I lie in the waiting darkness, shadowing your face like a cloud across the moon, illuminated for a moment before I am pulled on and gone.

My memories are like faded maps now, beautiful translucent pictures in my mind, but the lines are blurred I cannot find my way back to the places we were, the ones we were when we were there. They have shifted, subtly, sweetly, swept away by just the softest of rain. Gone are the blossoms that were falling on the day I left. Now with the scent of autumn coming on, the promise of cold bright nights that snap like frozen twigs beneath my feet, instead blooms the streetlights reflected on wet pavements where the shadows grow from out of the cracks.

I thought better than this, better than to come here in this way. As I was spiraling home through the air, down, descending down, I thought that memories are sweet; hands held beneath the table, your eyes creased at the corners, the scent of the flowers you gave me with that smile on your face telling me there was more, but they should be kept that way, preserved like a butterfly behind sheet glass and kept away from these changing winds.

But as I watch you tonight I know why I had to come here again and sail with you a while longer, you who just held me when the world shook and illuminated the shadows with your smile.

Ashes scattered like seeds in that cycle that is onward, upward, upward, caught between the ground and the sky. You ask, ‘isn’t there more?’ Well isn’t there? Ash and earth, what precious things from dust, forming silence from whispers.

The old ones come as the old ones will. They come in the quiet; they come like flow, in the arc and twist of smoke, in the billowing of cloth on the breeze. They come branching, curving in their way that grows through, treading these ancient pathways of natural law. This is how they come; this is how they are called. Arriving, drawn towards the magnetic pull. Like drawing like, following the path of least resistance, following the river and its steady stream. The fortune of the undertow.

It comes from here; the base, the centre, the heart of creation, pulling form, seat of strength. The foundation, the key stone, is here. Flowerlike, you have seen it. But where there is shame there can be no free flow. These are the sacred places of the Goddess. This is where we draw from; this is the seat of power. Magnetic pull and pulse, like a moon reflected in a silver chalice. Like an opening flower that knows only the light of darkness.

No Stormy Seas

No stormy seas can hold me. I am the wave, I am the voice, I am the rhythm singer taking down the darkness. No cloud will block the light, no vast lake of darkness; I am the brightness, the fullness, the zenith and return.

I am the answer in your wishes, and the hope that dances bright about you. I am the stormy seas and a lake so still it holds the stars.

And we with hearts like fire, turning all we see to dust and back again, growing life from the ashes. We the strong and brave ones that dance forth the very darkness and swallow your life whole. We the secret women, the ancient ones who came through, washing over and back, over and back the smooth stones of your mind. We reflect light and share it, leaving laughter in our wake.

Sea of lights, vast ocean, we may not tame the darkness but hold the sky for a while, just a while.

It seeps over me, the creeping dawn; it seeps like liquid beneath the door. It comes and comes over heralding itself like a lark calling in the night. Heat and the smell of spice and a voice raised in prayer. A head held high to god; she is a mystery unfolding, she is my cause and I am bound to her. I would hold a star in my hands to graze its brightness. I would hold life, I would hold and be held.

in between

We were not silenced we merely spoke in between the words. We merely moved to the side line and became invisible. Stepped as if into the mists and shadows and were gone so easily. So easily that it seemed we were never there. As if by some trick we just stepped into the shadows and the spaces in between. Becoming not one thing or the next, not one meaning or another, but in a space of our own, wordless and unknown. We had to, we had to move for time shifts and becomes new things. It becomes harder then softer, quicker then slower and the world then became a place we could not survive. Not in the black and white world. Not in a world where meaning and silence explained us gone. We moved then into the cracks, into the pauses, into the silences. We talked in whispers to those who remembered. We were the ripple on the wheat and the turning of the leaves. We became vaporous, insubstantial; un talked of, but remembered in the dormant memory.

We, like flowers, fall with rain. We are the wild patterns of life now, no spectacular show, no fireworks or blazing truth. We remain in the in between, in the shape of things to come, in the high arc and the low ebb. We watch and wait and take form when we can but whisper constantly to those who would listen, to those who would hear.