The Wild Feminine – a poem, or musings, or a string of thought
On my wild feminine alter
burns a sandalwood candle.
Fragile female flame,
I will hold you
Sacred,
in the heart of my hands.
Your light flickers tentative,
yet insistent.
I come with two questions:
What is a woman?
and,
Where is mine?
I am 35 and 11 in parallel breaths,
adolescent in my coming of age.
I place two seeds on my tongue,
bitter anise, fierce like underbrush fire
when fanned.
The snake seeks fennel before shedding,
I recently learned.
the seeds, a transformational aid, for us both—
rising helix of skin and sex and sexuality.
This poem, like truth and question,
starts as a child.
V-legged, I am on my yoga mat,
a white feather in my hair.
My hips are lungs—
collapsing and filling.
Their palms are earth-heavy.
I face down.
When I first looked at my yoni
in a mirror,
I found the shape of an angel in my labia.
I wept, like I did when I had my daughter,
and was similarly struck in both instances:
How could I have carried you and,
yet,
not know you?
I nursed my child into knowing,
but I drew my yoni into a schematic—
to make sense of her, to boil her down,
to see and feel and understand her essence.
I am many women—
Self,
Mother,
Wife,
Writer—
and yet, I seek my inner Wild Woman,
among the Wild Women
who have come before.
Back on my mat,
I hold my questions as my root opens.
A feline spine lifts,
falls,
curves,
rises—like Phoenix.
“Women want to be stroked, like Cat,”
someone once told me
when I told her that having sex sparked rage.
I lunge forward and
a flock of wheat-colored birds
flies from my left hip.
A deer comes, amidst the maize of pasture,
smell of childhood haying fields in summer—
free.
Freedom birds.
A sunflower blooms, earth-scented,
natural.
I throw my head back,
open-throated.
So THIS is what inhabitance feels like.
As a child, I am born again.
my woman rises, contracts,
waits.
I neutralize in
downward dog,
and lunge,
again.
A wolf-eyed sheet of steal
hisses from my right hip.
The sheen of sleet, slick, the smell
of labor and sweat and perfection,
trapped.
The sound of howling ice,
of silence on fire.
I carry all the men here:
my father,
my brother,
my husband,
my canine, wolf-self.
I wince at the orb of masculinity,
stiffen to soldier.
The fragrant white lily that bursts forth—
its sleekness,
its domestication,
its stamen:
it scares me.
I breathe,
but the child within me
goes blue.
“Give your inner woman a microphone,”
a wild, awakened woman
told me two ago when I asked her to
coach me
on how to not hate sex, how to be
an awakened woman.
“Your yoni knows everything,” the coach said.
“Your vagina and your voice,
they are connected. And your woman, your
yoni—
she knows everything.”
I lie on my back,
hold my toes as a happy baby.
The lips of my vulva open
into a tender, pink cave.
Open, winged, shiny,
it spirals like the inside of a conch shell,
or a calla lily,
toward an inner shrine I do not know.
My womb rocks, like a bowl
full of tides—
ebb, flow, slosh, settle.
The lunar cycle of my pelvis
often tells my anxious spirit
to stay small,
to harmonize,
not to make waves.
This is my story: not making waves.
And yet, as I rock on my mat,
cradling my cesarean scar,
I allow them—
the rise of the feminine cycles,
the conception,
the incubation,
the birth.
the death.
the rebirth.
the women in the collective
sphere around me.
Like a child, my woman is born here.
Free from old stories,
flowing like river,
and wind,
and blood.
Smooth like river stone,
I am the frog who rattles out
a song of release
before the rains.
I am deer,
and wolf,
and frog.
I am vagina and voice and flow
and intuition,
and light.
I am the white feather
woven into my curls
that whisper-screams:
I.am.woman.
And,
I.am.here.
And,
You.are.not.alone.
