A poem resurrected from 2015 - “Come to the Mess”

For Athene and Medusa in preparation for EarthSong WitchCamp:

People wonder, "Is she regulated?"

She laughs at the notion, at the ideal, at the curse...

She strides through halls filled with laughing children

and the zeal of torturous teens to discover that there in the threshold

lies a different kind of self-reflection.

People wonder, "Is she unhinged?"

She despairs by the sea at the forgettings that twist knots into serpents

and kink the tails of once proud leviathan avatars of grace,

nobility and star-born princes of wonder...

Everything springs forth it seems, but unlike the Kore in the Spring,

the Ineffable Maid who makes the people quake because She bears the Name of Destruction...

Unlike Her, the Twins spring forth by way of savagery and forgetting...

Her father devoured Her Mother, and Shining Mind in lightning digestion became an armoured and valorous question to empires.

Her Parents were buried under infinite waves of separation and longing

and She bore the breast to be unnerved by, even before the mighty mask of terror and initiation.

Wonder at the Dark Maid, and wonder at the Saffron-robed Lady.

I sit on the Acropolis with a friend and we argue class, identity and politics on old rocks who have heard it all before.

We are gathering with many others to witness the sun vanish beyond the rim of the World.

I hear the Lady in the Temple above laugh and brandish forth a strangled cry to the ravens of prophesy and plague...to the serpents entwining with orgy in the hollow cave of Pan below,

And She reminds me that She is that kind of Mystery. No analysis is brought to Her altar.

Come to the whole mess She says wryly. Her Dark Sister is silent, but breathes and unnerves the Winds of the Eight Ways.

Come to the whole mess because this is the raw and damaged world of perilous beauty you have dared to come into...Come to the whole mess and reject nothing because within the tangled and torturous vines of the forests below and of the curses laid down in hair are the Questions that might become, in the right fires, the gold of learning that is ever Athene's desire.

To humankind She promises Wisdom. Then we must make of ourselves Wisdom.

Armoured in the Saffron of Helios and Valorous in the Night's indigo lament She is.