Poetry Series: Rage
I'm starting a mini series here in the podcast of poetry! For now I think it will be things I have written, but I might expand it to other people's writing as well.
This is a poem I wrote to process/unravel an emotional process. Continually working with this rage has been a powerful meditation for my this past year.
For more on female/mother rage, definitely read this blog post by Rachelle Garcia Seliga.
Stacey Ramsower is also an amazing resource.
And Stacey and Rachelle did a podcast episode together! It contains a super potent moment in relation to this topic.
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Rage
Recently I’ve found myself full of rage.
Not rage like a volcano eruption in its immediate passion,
Spewing lava at whoever happened to have the bad luck of going for a hike.
But rage like the molten core of the earth
The oozing liquid fire that tectonic plates move over.
Not dramatic or for display
But deep, silent and ancient.
Not meant to be seen.
Maybe it’s because they cut my cord with tiny scissors.
Cutting me off from my blood supply while it was still flowing
And severing my connection to my mother goddess.
Then they inspected me with the gloves hands while I blinked in the fluorescent lighting and thought
“This is not how they told me it would be”
But it would be too convenient to pass it all on childhood trauma.
On the severing we all experience
Between the world we came to create and the reality we slid into.
Where we play by their rules.
We try so hard to appear as the same shape and size as our friends but just when we think we’ve made it, someone sees our second head, our eight arms, our third eye
And tells us to put that away.
It’s not appropriate for polite society.
But it’s not fair to explain my rage away as being unseen as a child.
Not fitting in because I chose to come here as a horse of a different color.
I could be full of feminist rage.
Feeling the way my body and my bleeding have been confined.
I tuck in my goddess belly
And contort my spine
because good girls lead with their breasts held out first.
Put in harms way for the sake of getting a good picture.
But god forbid you are a woman who is actually led by her womb and heart space.
But I put down the feminist mantle when I realized that I don’t want equality, I want harmony.
I don’t need to do everything a man does to feel worthy
And if someone is going to tell me I’m not a feminist because maybe I just want you have a lot of babies and bake my own bread and scrub toilets and bow to the soul of the masculine by nourishing and worshiping the body of my husband,
then fantastic. I’m not a feminist.
My rage feels pelvic centered.
My pelvic bowl is a container for an atomic core of rage.
But not reactive rage.
It is inspired rage.
I feel it seeping through the cracks when I have done too much.
When I tell myself that eight months isn’t postpartum anymore, you should be able to carry that.
So I do and then I feel all the beautiful muscles and tendons that suspended the tiny ocean for my beautiful babe
creak and stretch like an old wooden sailboat.
Just when they thought they could rest enough to heal, they are asked to carry more.
“Here, if you can almost handle this, let’s give you more.”
Because it’s never about less, is it?
No one ever says
You can push less, sell less, post less
And still expect results
No one tells you that as your capacity to hold expands, you can choose to take less.
They say healing isn’t linear,
But it still doesn’t feel good to go backwards.
To know that your muscles are weaker, your core is less functional
Because you forgot you were still tender.
And so rage peaks through the cracks in my linea alba because I’m the one who did this to myself.
I’m the one who decided to carry that.
That pot of water
That piece of news
That judgement
My rage is like an electric fence around a rabbit hutch.
I have crossed my own boundaries too many times and ventured too close to the predators in the forest.
My vulnerability.
My heart that is so soft and so tender and stronger than any metal.
My womb.
Why does it take a healing crisis for so many of us to listen to our wombs?
To bow with the deepest honor to the wisdom of this portal.
To cradle and care for our womb space with reverence for all that She is.
This is where all life started.
I hold the history of all of creation in my own body
The primordial spark
The Big Bang
And she has told me so many times the simple lessons of the feminine.
It’s ok to be soft
It’s ok to say no
It’s ok to rest
And I have said
Yes, but I’ll just push this wheelbarrow for the one more day.
And every time I have said that,
Every time I have decided not to listen
That ball of protective rage grew.
It knew that one day it would be called upon to hold the boundary
The ring of fire
Surrounding the waters
Not to keep them captive but to keep them safe.
So now the task becomes to organize and dedicate my life in service to my womb.
To allow the shepherds crooks to be used for directing the sheep, not fighting the wolves.
To become an obedient daughter to my Mother so that force of rage can calm from a wildfire to the torches in the fire towers. Illuminating the boundaries and keeping watch while I sleep.
And if I can do that, the excess energy that lit up my spine and my nervous system can be recycled.
Can be channeled through new pathways of safety and nourished nerves as creativity.
We talk of creative fires but if the body is stuck in overwhelm all the flames are ignited to fight and defend.
I would like to model my life after the Nourns.
To sit at the foot of the tree of life
Nestled within her roots
And spin with my sisters.
Spin our raw rage with the spindles that we’re our birthright into the fine thread of life.
It will be lumpy to begin with. The yarn will keep breaking as we spread the wool too thin in hopes of conserving when we forget the infinite source.
(A cosmic sheep? A lamb of god?)
But as we spin and sing together, we will make yarn that loops around the moon.
We will spin all of our prayers into the finest red yarn.
Dyed by the red of our blood-rage-passion crushed up with some hibiscus and poke berries and the very first sun of the morning.
And we will knit bomb the world.
Keep our loved ones warm with sweaters and hats and Bernie Sanders mittens. Knit jumpers for our grandchildren and slippers for our grandmothers.
Sweatshops, looms the size of factory buildings, department stores will shut down because everyone will be clothed by the love of their mother and love for their mothers.
This isn’t some pink p^$$¥ hat agenda,
We are spinning the yarn of fate.
Not like the isolated volcano, we are the magma at the very center of the earth.
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