Tag Archives: mother goddess

Mother Earth

She waits for us to understand,
or better, to remember:
that at her breast we all have suckled
since we each began;
and for a thousand thousand years
have eaten at her table,
imagining some unseen other
laying out the spread.

She waits for us to come back home.
Our lives are spent returning:
pretending that we start apart,
we blindly seek connection
to what we would call the divine,
imagining it elsewhere
when it is underneath our feet.
We never can be parted.

She waits for us to recognize,
to hear, to begin listening:
the current runs inside of all,
a song we all are singing,
that all is sacred or none is,
that there is no exclusion;
what binds us is her life in us.
What separates? Illusion.

22 APR 2013 (Earth Day 2013)

Share This:

The Moon Dancing

The moon is swollen full tonight,
her belly stretched out in the light;
that glow ascribed to pregnant maids
reflects down through the tall pines’ shade
and with a wash of purple blue
includes the woods’ edge in my view.

There in the timid shadows where
the evening breeze parts leaves like hair
a scent of cedar, oak and gum
plays softly as a guitar strummed
against the senses, soft and low,
as limbs brush gently to and fro.

Against the lunar silhouettes
played out along the low slung fence
the moonlight dances, shy and meek,
as if it would, should someone speak,
retreat back to the forest wall
and act as if not there at all.

16 OCT 2005

Share This:

No one stole the moon

No one stole the moon from us
by force. Instead, they bade us sleep;
in that little death our memory
faded, and our Mother’s song

(not the sing-song lullabies
or product placing jingle-jangle
from an artificial moonlight
like an android babysitter,
but the rhythm of our organs,
constant hum of blood in veins,
synchronized with breath and being)

was lost. And seeking to remember,
in a simple act of faith,
won’t erase the hurt and sadness
of our Mother, so long gone.

Why should she accept with open
arms children that spurned her love?
Why would she be wrong to need
a sacrifice from us to prove

that we were really looking, this time,
with our ears ready to hear
the song she taught us, now forgotten?
Where have we been all these years?

09 MAY 2005

Share This:

The Roots Must Lead

The roots must lead us further down;
it does no good to taste the fruit
unless we first have knelt in shadows
there among the rotting leaves.

The kneeling first, and then the crawl
along the coursing, mottled bark
that starts to thicken as the trunk
breaks through the soil that gives it life.

Among the worms that churn the muck,
the beetles and the stinging ants:
there where the humus is still moist
and cakes to concrete on our hands

we find the source, the Mother core,
like buried treasure from the deep,
between the fingers of the oak
splayed like a hand clutching the earth.

The grass between your toes, so soft,
gives only hints and subtle clues;
to find the Mother’s hidden love
cast off by culture’s mad distain

requires the digging, dirty knees,
and scratches drawing your own blood;
a desperate scrabble down and down
past patriarchy’s well-kept sod.

Her love is buried, long-forgot;
and proving ourselves worthy, work.
If you would make your half a whole,
man, woman, child: dig deep.

08 MAY 2005

Share This:

For Starlight Born with Robbie Burns

Although some celebrate today
the Scotsman’s favorite bard,
my day is elsewise occupied
and I shall find it hard

to think of he whose “Auld Lang Syne”
will ring out through the night.
For this day someone else was born
who gives my life delight.

My first, my last, my everything,
my better half, by far,
the truest friend I’ve ever had:
my one and only Star.

So Robbie Burns, I wish ye well
there under heath and sod;
You’ve given me much, I admit,
to think on man and God.

But today is for goddesses,
and I’ve one in the flesh;
were you alive, it’s likely you
would feel the same, I guess.

A toast to verse, and tuneful speech,
to poets at their rest,
and to the muses such as mine
who give all life their zest.

25 JAN 2005

For Sondra (Starlight Dances)

Share This:

Oh Mother Help Me

For some reason this morning I woke up thinking of the hymn “Sweet Hour of Prayer” — in particular the wonderful bluegrass version done by the Osbourne Brothers. And I thought to myself, “Self, why is it that there are so few good pagan hymns?” At least in the neo-pagan tradition, that is. There are a myriad of songs to the Great Mother in Bengali, but so few outside of India get a chance to experience the longest unbroken tradition of Mother Goddess worship in the world.

So much of pagan music seems to be directed at a specific audience, and to deny the universal appeal of paganism outside its adherents. Perhaps that’s because of the strict policy most pagan traditions have of non-proselytizing. Perhaps it’s because so many neo-pagans are “recovering” Christians who would deny the positive effect that hymns and such have — it is a power to step beyond the practice and immerse oneself in what the spirit of a religion is supposed to be.

Ah, well. Also, a lot of pagan music tries to place itself into a separate genre, a world unto itself — as opposed to writing pagan rock songs, pagan country songs, pagan bluegrass. The problem with that approach is, of course, that music forms are the natural development of an indigenous culture. To deny these forms as vehicles for expression is to, in my opinion, go against one of the very things that defines pagans to begin with.

So here it is. A pagan bluegrass song. A pagan hymn, if you will. Imagine Ralph and Carter Stanley singing it, instead of “Man of Constant Sorrow”. Someday, when I get my home studio back in working order, I’ll put it to disc and hope to do it justice.

There is a shadow that lingers on
after the cover of night is gone
it seeks to darken enlightened souls
and separate each part from the whole

Seeking a power beyond their ken
the world is destroyed by shadowed men
and despite knowing their way is flawed
they seek to prove theirs the only god

Oh Mother help me
to understand
see past illusion wrought by your hand
Oh Mother help me
to see your face
and walk beside you all of my days

We walk in darkness, and do not know
it is but shadow that makes it so
Blinded to reason and lost to care,
we fumble searching for what’s not there

Some think they’ve found it, the one true path
for all to follow or be downcast;
Their eyes set on some far distant goal,
they seek all others to control

Oh Mother help me
to find my way
see past illusions that cloud the day
Oh Mother help me
to see your form
and find a shelter from this great storm

There is a shadow across our hearts
It hides the one place where all truth starts
and separates us, who should be one,
into these fragments left each undone

Each clinging to one small grain of sand,
in darkness, claiming our light is grand;
Lost in illusion, and dark design,
We trade the sacred for “me and mine”.

Oh Mother help me
to see the light
find truth worth sharing past wrong and right
Oh Mother help me
your name to sing
and see the wonder of everything.

16 JAN 2005

Share This:

Mother Father Breathing

With each breath, opposites are reconciled:
like the unconscious seeping under the door
that the river makes as it rises during the night,
then at first light ebbs slowly away
as the sun’s heat pulls it into its glowing bosom.

To dub the inhalation Da, to sense its quiet strength,
then name it Ma as it comes forth from the lungs,
its motion merged with infinite atmosphere,
warm tendrils seeking out atom by atom
the molecules that shape the space,
flesh out the illusions of matter
and the world’s wide mask of being and nothing,
is to lower a string into a lake
and think you’ve split the water.

There is a moment, between sighs,
where there is only one expanse of air,
samadhi in a pregnant pause;
and in that instant what divides
a flame from its penchance to burn
becomes the only line between
the different forms of god.

22 DEC 2004

Share This: