Just today

Just by mid-afternoon
On a day slowed down by thick heat
I have -

Made our bed
Swept our floors
Cleaned our toilet & sink
Washed our dishes from last night's snacks
                               from breakfast
                               from lunch (leftovers from last night's dinner that I made)

Finished (begun yesterday) and strained a batch of chicken broth
For a future meal on some other day slowed down
By thick heat
Washed that pot, that strainer.

Made our evening meal early, before the day got hotter, thicker
Washed the utensils and cleaned the counter and sink for the umpteenth time today
By mid-afternoon
On a day slowed down by thick heat.

Pretty good for a ghost.

She

is always there but She rarely speaks
She rarely has to.

and when She does her voice is as water
as starlight
as the teeth of a bear gnawing on alder

that strong.

***********************************************

Yes, I study the Bible (off and on) and yes, it moves me in ways I did not expect.

But my blood runs in rivulets, my hair grows like a weed, I am the stuff of soil and leaf, the Goddess's daughter.

God and Goddess, not in opposition, not one above the other, and especially not one cancelling out the other. It's all just words, anyway, all just stories made-up by humans to explain (away?) the inexplicable. Still, my stories, the words that I gotta use to hold my experiences if I want to share them with anyone, are in the language of woman. My being is woman.

She - the great She - is written out of that book but written into my heart. The desert god is a jealous god; he is not my god; he would disapprove of me.

brick ring

It's about 10x10
Feet that is, the square, and
The soil is good and rumpled.
I hope to add rocks, bury some of them.

Bury some rocks, yes, that's what I'll do.

I'm planting burdock
Planting burdock and burying rocks
(Because burdock loves an anchor)
In the the brick ring in the square.


You can believe in rocks; have faith in them
I mean, they will remain rocks.
Right?
I mean, you can smash a rock up
You can grind a rock down but all you get is littler rocks.
Still rocks.

And that's another thing rocks are good at right there.
Remaining still.

You know what you can't believe in? Words.
They're sloppy things
They slosh around
In a state of surface tension oversensitivity
That so belies their weight it's hard
Enough to wrap one's head around them
Let alone anchor one's roots.

I AM MY HOUSE

I had a dream, or something, that woke me up last night.

I was hovering above a small family. They were walking home. They had bundles of bedding with them as though they'd been forced out but now they were coming home. I watched them round the corner to their street and it was gone. Bombed. I saw the man and boys stop in their tracks, just looking, and I heard her, the mother, begin to keen and wail and I felt a wrenching in my gut.

They say that when women give birth, there comes a moment when we feel connected to all other women who ever have, or ever will, go through that experience. I felt her pain in the same way, the universal depth to which we feel ourselves and our homes to be one. I knew that she felt - that I would feel - that to lose one's home is to be destroyed.

We can analyse that, say whether it is right or wrong, whether a woman is or should be more than what she does for her family but let's not. Let's just acknowledge what is.

I wrote the piece below because of that dream. Or whatever it was.