I wrote this poem back in 2017. Facebook reminded me of it today. I’ve read it over and over again this evening. I’ve needed to. I hope it reaches another woman who needs it too.
To All The Women Who Have Died To Live
To all the women who have lived
and died and lived again.
Take yourself into the forest alone.
Walk until the sounds of the town
are no more. Walk until all you can smell
is sap from the trees felled in winter storms,
and the last of the snow.
When your thighs are dull with aching,
when sweat has pooled into all of your crevices,
when your mouth is as dry as the inside
of a bear’s den, then rest.
Drop to your knees.
Place your dirty hands on your chest,
feel it, your wild, pounding heartbeat.
It wants this existence. It still has so much to give.
Trace the scenic route of your veins
running rivers up your arms.
Kiss those blue rivers, for as long as they run,
you are here and everything is possible.
Those Brísingamen eyes, they will flicker again,
oh she wolf, they will shine!
And the past, you will kick it down.
It cannot punish you anymore.
You are brave.
Sing to the moon and dance
yourself to joy in her light.
Now, walk boldly home,
woman who has lived and died
and who lives again.
(This poem will feature in my upcoming collection My Heart Is A Forest. It’s a collection of poetry that I’ve written from 2009 – 2019.)
Celebrating the strange and the shadowy, the damned and unseen 