Part 1: HYMNS
Mothersongs
emergent
11. SONG OF THE UNBURIED
1993: Another visitation, a mythic awake-story:
I dreamed the unburying of Earth-Woman-Spirit:
of Goddess, wife of God.
SHE LIES SUBMERGED within her Earth.
Only the stone tips of her features are slowly revealing: the age-packed earth and sand shifting beneath the work of wind and rain and centuries.
He can see her, has found her, at last, his stone Goddess: He who has been searching throughout his young and recent life.
He can kneel down upon the sand, brush her dusted stone lips: immobile through ages.
And she is slowly stirred to sensation: can feel the vibration of his warmth, his speed, his blood life. As he breathlessly dusts more earth from her face: brushes her closed eyes, her stone cheeks: smoothes her closed eyelids.
She is warming, electrified by his life, his alert intent consciousness, his physical body and its purposeful motion.
He is touching, now, discovering her emergent features, scraping with his hands, dragging at the resistant earth embedding her hidden form. Pressing against her warming cheeks, his own.
*
And she is acheing, her cold unburied limbs, the pain of circulation creeping, then surging to her surface. The first stiff movement after her millennia of interment.
Go slowly: her appeal, in her deep thought. This is not my way. It was men’s ancestral knowledge of exertion and force and power that once buried me alive: buried alive my female knowledge of measured pace.
Release me slowly, I entreat you : and give me gentle passage for my immense arrival, my Entrance.
My essence is grace and stately motion: I am not made for jolting or for speed.
And somewhere between your racing waking vibrancy, and my still and ancient sleep, is the moving pace for human beings. Where we can walk, and run, in step.
Climb together, fly the wind together. Sleep deeply together. Wake, in emergent joy, together.
And he has uncovered her, at last: has clawed and scraped and brushed the dirt of ages from her cold body, cracked the clay from her matted hair, and supported her slow stiff uplifting from the earth-bed; to lie, then raise herself to crouch, shaking, exhausted on the ground before him.
And then he has stood up, and turned his face to the horizon; and she can lean, now, naked, against his clothed leg.
*
Her acheing consciousness, too, is stirring with her spreading bloodstream: becoming aware of her huddled fatigue, the immense effort of his exhumation: the broken bleeding fingernails suspended near her face, her own immense exertion to drag stone-chilled limbs from the earth. Her caked-mud face, dirt-hair.
And the creeping recollection, of silenced ordeal. The beginnings of tears, to creep and trickle down the mudcracks: her remembrance of black immobility, the long earth-muffled silence of all other Sisters, still lying in their deep internment beneath the surface.
And some of the tears fall, too, in the beginnings of gratitude, for the hands that dragged and tore at the stony dirt to uncover the petrified body; for the New Man who heard the faint and desperate subterranean music of the Buried Woman, and used his full strength to lift her to the surface of the earth.
And some of the tears run for the high blessing of this moment, this transformation of consciousness that is breathing out now from the living planet. This allegory of rescue, of encounter, of dawning reunion of woman with man, of new women with new men.
*
The man’s bloodied finger touches the matted hair. She hears the slow intake of his breath, the great sigh he hurls out towards the horizon: his sense of achievement, of power.
But not the power of prevailing might, over women or over other men :
~ it is his inbreath of awe: for the immensity of this tidal moment.
~ it is his heaved triumph over history, over men’s history of oppression and violence, of war with themselves.
~ it is his bursting outbreath of freedom.
She shivers, with gathering awareness of damp, of cold. Above her head, there is some movement; and he lowers his shirt to her shoulders, lays it upon her to warm her shaking chill
TODAY THE EARTH WOMAN IS WOKEN : and she is Unburied, and Released,
after centuries of interment and internment :
the Mother Goddess.
And her memory of this is clamour, bruising bodies, the forceful hands that clamped her arms and pushed her down with her sisters and grandmothers into the lightless chamber beneath the earth. She can remember the strident voices of men, like the clash and grate of iron.
And she can remember the calling music of the women: she hears them in her head throughout the centuries until this moment.
And the clothed leg at her shoulder is a man’s limb; and his sigh is a man’s deep exhalation.
*
She turns away, and hunches kneeling against the earth, and her trickle flows to crying: a shuddering recall of her sisters’ eons of enforced silence.
And of her beholdenment to this man: who is surely one of them, the tough hands, the hard-breathing body, of a captor.
Her voice calls out in crescendo to her Grandmothers, for an answer and for assistance, as they have always given :
~ And she waits :
~ she waits :
– But they are silenced: the sacred old Mothers :
still entombed within the Earth,
with all her sisters.
She is alone.
*
And so ~ I am alone. With a man. The only person on Earth I can call to: A man.
But I am driven to sing out, to whoever is there to hear: these sustained deep notes of Woman, and the streaming descant appeal of their Daughters.
WE SING our Song of Sadness for our Daughters :
our song of appeal to those above of sentinel male power, to realise what they have buried alive : this youthful female beauty.
Their futile fading future, to wither yet again in darkness.
~ And their brave light voices join us, strand by strand, our girl children : to the high rock crannies of the tomb.
The collective, rising cry of Women:
knowing that even the combined strength of the Sisterhood
(our natural and rightful lack of physical power)
is no match for the armed, advantaged,
hostile, and loaded hand
that still forces us down.
*
O GODDE, A MAN. I MUST SING, crouching on this broken earth, to a man.
I have no choice: I must call out now : to whoever can hear.
Even if it is a man. This Man : his bare cracked hands.
O GODDE ~ this tall man ~ you had better be different from the others. You had better be of new stuff. You had better be a High Man, a man of new knowledge, a man of High Degree.
FOR I COULD NOT BEAR TO FACE YOU, be uplifted by you, be released by you ~ if you are the same as Men have been for these last crushing millennia.
Could not bear to be unlocked by the captor who bound me,
my turn-key of ages.
No !
~ I am clenched, my whole body, with this resolution.
NO !
I would, instead, return gladly to my rocky tomb:
than be disinterred by the same hand
that buried the Spirit of Woman alive.
The turn-key of ages.
Priest and general, lord and judge.
The Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove.
Could not bear to be unlocked by the captor who bound me,
my turn-key of ages.
I can bury myself again : can return to the Earth.
I can, I will,
scrape out the passage to my tomb, to my own grave,
with my own small bare hands :
rather than submit to such a patronage of Warrior Power.
Pull the earth down over my own body,
sprinkle my own face with covering dirt :
* ~ Disappear once more from your Sight : *
~ if you do not, can not, watch me stand up at last, shaking and naked before you ; and stay your hand, and lower your gaze, and contain your age-old exhibition of phallic power.
And reach out your hand to me,
and offer me the long coat from off your back;
to cover my body from the lewd and rapacious eyes of lesser men.
