Passage

And it was cold… so cold,
and it was dark… so dark
this cave of me.
Mother I thought I would never return,
deep jagged shadows consuming me,
then molten, lost memories
rising from the freeze to envelope my skin,
shrouding me in a sudden fiery cape.
I was slow inside of it,
confused and frightened
within this keeper of the gate.
Then a sound of my tears hissing water
onto smoldering fire
like salty seafoam on lava.
They were droplets at first
eaten up by heat
but they grew and flowed,
trickling, then streaming from my eyes
to meet liquid rock.

Mother, it was a privilege somehow …to cry
To let all sorrow fall open to the ground.
salt and water of me pouring out.
My tears were pulled from me
as if from an ocean inside forced by the moon:
grief, terror, loss,

even your tears flowed from me,
surging, cascading over this cape of fire
until feeling was all of me.
I was a river raging, tumbling into sea
and the sound became louder,
water quelling fire, fire quelling water
quenching, quenching a thirst.
Some thirst, some call brought me here
to be reborn in the life force.

Then as fire and water battled in me
some hole in the gate sucked me in
and here it came to me – breath,
sacred air filling that deep place
where the well had been drawn dry,
and through that space my arm swept free
then my heart, head, pelvis, belly and feet.

I was standing in puddles of hissing fire
when the last of it dropped by magic
from my body, and came a new sound,
a shock… the sound of my Voice!
Sound of need, of rage,
sound of my belly rising up strong
to empower this voice, this life
proclaiming my right to be.

I danced. I moved, I tested,
became light of foot.
Across tunnel-ways,
now bathed in light, I found laughter.
I was wings, I was roots,
my new tender skin radiating light.

And there behind me,
at the mouth of the cave, a tree,
the most beautiful tree… she gave me her form.
Mother, though I was without you, I was within you,
there in the womb of the Earth.
And it was tears that brought me home.
Thank the Goddess for those tears.

And look, I bring a gift I have found,
a flower given by the tree.
Receive it with me, the innocence of who I am
as I return to you whole.