I.
It was like a thousand tiny realizations
exploded into the night sky,
like fireworks or the birth of galaxies.
A thousand pinpricks of light
that became the constellations
I alone could name, from
legends I alone could write.
A tiny light, crouched and quiet in a vast darkness, waiting for a miracle. An explosion of time and space into swirling gas. A thousand pinpricks from one, seeking each other in the great nothingness. A body was formed, heat and lava dripping from her skin, each ember becoming another body in a dance, a ring of fire. Spitting sulphur and steam into the air of a virgin planet, the fire goddesses were alone and angry in an eternal hot flash. For eons their fire raged from the molten center of everything, until they burned themselves out, forming into great volcanoes to help their children remember isolation. Open mouths pointed upwards to catch a falling star from their sisters in the constellations.
With the cooling came the rain gathering in ponds. Dormant, tormented goddesses rose from the water crying turquoise tears that would become oceans of angry white capped waves, for they still knew a longing for what they had left far behind them. They still knew a longing for space and weightlessness. They had not yet became used to the feel of gravity and how it pulls on a fresh soul. As these water goddesses cried themselves out they became the rivers that fed the soil and gave birth to fertility. From the rich mud rose the earth goddesses who walked the earth with seeded feet, so distant from the stars that they only knew joy and a deep love for this once barren rock.
Legends told of goddesses
who loved so softly
that flowers bloomed beneath
their feet as they walked.
Who as they grew old and tired,
laid down and became the mountains
watching over the world.
The earth goddesses found their creations so beautiful that they laid down among them, spread their seed to the winds and became the mountains. Their deep wrinkles becoming the rocky slopes, their white hair the snowcaps. Their seeds drifted, birthing dryads that bore sweet fruit in their wombs, birthing entire orchards from the seeds of their sensuality. Their anger had burned out, their sorrow had eased, and now they longed for playmates in this world they had created. They blew life into the plums, the apples, the peaches, and made humans from the fruit of their labor. Into a beautiful world of volcanoes, oceans, mountains, forests, and the animals who were the early prototypes, came man. And that would be the goddesses downfall.
II.
Goddesses who were now deemed
weak for their tears,
silly for their anger,
soft for their love,
useless for their age,
or simply symbols to be collected
for their curves and their desire.
From the bitter fruit, the lemon, the lime, bitter children were born. Men who wanted to see themselves reflected in the water and the sky. Who wanted to name the mountains and claim them for their own. They turned from the goddesses and created a god in their own image, who took dominion over everything, just as bitter fruit overpowers the sweet. The men laughed at the goddess worship and sacrificed beauty to an altar of power. They called upon their own god and used their superior strength to yoke the donkey, slaughter the calf, cage the bird, and to possess the soul of the goddess left in the shadow of a woman’s legs. They could not stand that they had not created the beauty that was found there, so they sought to make it their own. They even found a way to own the path of the sunlight.
The goddess children
knew the path of the sun,
but had not yet been forced
to rise before dawn or
to work long after sundown.
Keeping time is a creation, not
of the goddess, but of those
that would seek as they always
have to control the light and who
call a face with hands a master.
They called those who remembered the goddess “witches” and built fear around the crones. They deemed tears and flowers to be frivolous things of women, and renamed empathy “weakness.” They took the stories from the women and retold them as their own, creating new celebrations in the name of a father, rather than an earth mother. The wheel of the year that had turned for everyone in time with the seasons, the sowing, and the reaping, now wobbled through an imaginary cycle of the birth and death of a single soul. They wrapped women in layers of white and muslin and called them virginal, like barren land. They dug into the flesh of the mountainside, poisoned the turquoise tears of the water goddess, and bulldozed the orchards to see their sky god more clearly. War was born of blood oath and greed, and everyone hungered for just one taste of the sweet fruit of the early orchards.
They fight what they can’t control.
They rule with a strong fist.
They belittle with breathless words,
but they will know they have been
beaten by the beauty of stillness
and solitude, lakes and birdsong.
A wise woman poet spoke words onto paper declaring that what had been deemed weakness, was indeed power. Tears and anger, sensuality and beauty — here was the path to something greater than suffering. Her words entered the consciousness like a whisper and awoke something inside all of the sleeping goddess children. “You come from the stars,” their DNA whispered. “You created the water and the mud that feeds your captors. You are born from anger and tears and the stone in the middle of ripe flesh. You remember.”
They destroy what they can’t control,
but it will always come back
singing in their ear
when they think it dead.
III.
Watch them fail
as they heat the oceans,
melt the glaciers,
and hide from the fires
coming down the canyon.
Watch them die
at the hands of a mother
who can’t take
another day
of their shit.
The goddesses are restless. They have spent so long ruling from their hiding places under the mountains and inside the volcanoes. Shaking every once in awhile to remind themselves they are still here. They can feel a change on the wind. They can feel the seeds of something new being planted in the orchards of soft fleshed fruit. They are ripe for awakening.
Each human child of the orchard remembers the song of the leaves. As the wheel turns and the colors run through their veins, they remember the song of the rainstorm. They remember how to heal the mountains, purify the water, clean the air, and bury the bombs seeking to destroy. They will cry and scream the stories of the goddess into the heavens where they will be heard by the god of man and he will know his reign has ended in failure. With the stories free from imprisonment, billions of souls will be freed from suffering, free to hold something other than destruction in their disarmed arms.
A thousand tiny legends exploded
into being in which I could
rewrite a history where the
goddesses made the world
from their gentle hands,
where no one is expected to be a warrior,
only to bear arms that embrace another.