We Are the Rebirth of Prometheus...
Medusafern
Posts: 7
Last summer I was asked by a shaman friend to write a letter to God, or "Beloved" as she refers to the-whatever-is-Divine in this Universe. What resulted was a 20 minute flurry of strange and unanticipated phrases. No editing, no retouching, just a flood. Some people read this letter and laugh. It's been called pretentious and unauthentic. All I can say to that response is that if IT is, I must be also. Yet after all this life has handed me, I can't say I feel particularly superficial. But, each to his own. All I know is that I love words, and even though they sometimes pale and fail to do justice to the more unknowable things in this life, when they are coupled, mated, transposed together through time and space they can make extraordinary magick...
Dear Beloved,
Mother said my eyes were sad at birth. Like a river that wants only to flow backwards, like the deep brown of the otter who knows there will never again be any fish, like the trout which flails against an eternally ravaging current, my mother beheld the eyes of the only child she would ever birth and wondered what sorrow eroded her. “If I could send you back, little one ~” But the realm of fluid spirit would no longer contain my sand-bagged soul. And so I came, reversed into this world, with eyes like rapids, crying for home.
When was it that my soul began to splinter? For how long had the fawn gone without food? Through whose eyes did I witness the rise of the coral snake as it bore down the trembling infant deer? Just when did the nightmares begin of paintings come to life and snatching me inside them? And who could know I would wish farewell to my ten year old soul while burning families of paper dolls aside the hearth during those long Vermont winters?
I could not stay here. I would not stay here. My body might remain, but the rest of me could slither off unseen between the pinks and indigos that named the dusking sky. Now you see me, now you don’t. I will find my kind among the faeries where Sun is not permitted entry, I will subsist upon ash and dew and venom, I will make quilts of shadows and cloak myself in them, and when they come from their villages with torches afire I will seek haven in the attic where bats make their roost, blind, but never losing sight of night flight paths beyond this planetary coil.
Beloved, my eyes always yearned to see more deeply. My heart always asked for all the answers. My hands dared not resist the searing knob even as the smell of torture beckoned from the other side. I said that I would take it all, I showed you how the hinges in my jaw unhook to let the rat pass through my fangs, and felt the oldest pang of shame as I beheld my nakedness and licked my wounds and felt the feral eyes of wolf plunge famished into veins I never knew I had ~ I stood tall as the Amazon who takes the dagger without even a wince and with that fire thrust forth my desire that no one would ever splay me again. No one.
With whose voice did I utter “But you don’t want to kill me…” With what tongue did I form the sounds that claimed that primal power passed down to us from our mother stars? And how ever to make passage from the wildish bleeding visceral to the universal calm within the torrent cyclone’s core? How ever to be in it but not of it? How do we ask the wind to cease uprooting soul? And from what underground spring are we reminded to say, “But what is your Sorrow?” How do we become the reed that bends forgivingly, how do we end the swimming backwards to see where we’ve been, and face fearless the Niagara that always awaits us beyond the brink?
Once I treaded water awaiting your response. Now I feel you swimming through my very being. Once I asked for antidotes to quell the poison’s sting. Now I taste its bitter and find it rather pleasing. Once I dreamt the Pegasus would fly me from this mortal soil. Now I find that I have wings. But I won’t be anyone’s Icarus. I won’t melt when you see into me. And I will build the Babel with unholy reverence and place a flag of Love atop its crest.
We are each in this but not of this. We are each ash nestling the eggs of owlets who will see all in the dark. We are at once the ape discovering fire and too the breath of Divine that keeps it aflame. I am both the I and the We and We shall now tell you this story with our fourth eye, the one that merges every eye through which we’ve ever seen, and every voice with which we’ve cried out to you from bloody roadside rapes and white picket gates through which facades are molting skins of snakes, we are thus made clean. The onion knows the truth. Through so much weeping we are born to you anew. We are the rebirth of Prometheus and this time we don’t have to steal your fire.
Hillary Hays
June 2004
Dear Beloved,
Mother said my eyes were sad at birth. Like a river that wants only to flow backwards, like the deep brown of the otter who knows there will never again be any fish, like the trout which flails against an eternally ravaging current, my mother beheld the eyes of the only child she would ever birth and wondered what sorrow eroded her. “If I could send you back, little one ~” But the realm of fluid spirit would no longer contain my sand-bagged soul. And so I came, reversed into this world, with eyes like rapids, crying for home.
When was it that my soul began to splinter? For how long had the fawn gone without food? Through whose eyes did I witness the rise of the coral snake as it bore down the trembling infant deer? Just when did the nightmares begin of paintings come to life and snatching me inside them? And who could know I would wish farewell to my ten year old soul while burning families of paper dolls aside the hearth during those long Vermont winters?
I could not stay here. I would not stay here. My body might remain, but the rest of me could slither off unseen between the pinks and indigos that named the dusking sky. Now you see me, now you don’t. I will find my kind among the faeries where Sun is not permitted entry, I will subsist upon ash and dew and venom, I will make quilts of shadows and cloak myself in them, and when they come from their villages with torches afire I will seek haven in the attic where bats make their roost, blind, but never losing sight of night flight paths beyond this planetary coil.
Beloved, my eyes always yearned to see more deeply. My heart always asked for all the answers. My hands dared not resist the searing knob even as the smell of torture beckoned from the other side. I said that I would take it all, I showed you how the hinges in my jaw unhook to let the rat pass through my fangs, and felt the oldest pang of shame as I beheld my nakedness and licked my wounds and felt the feral eyes of wolf plunge famished into veins I never knew I had ~ I stood tall as the Amazon who takes the dagger without even a wince and with that fire thrust forth my desire that no one would ever splay me again. No one.
With whose voice did I utter “But you don’t want to kill me…” With what tongue did I form the sounds that claimed that primal power passed down to us from our mother stars? And how ever to make passage from the wildish bleeding visceral to the universal calm within the torrent cyclone’s core? How ever to be in it but not of it? How do we ask the wind to cease uprooting soul? And from what underground spring are we reminded to say, “But what is your Sorrow?” How do we become the reed that bends forgivingly, how do we end the swimming backwards to see where we’ve been, and face fearless the Niagara that always awaits us beyond the brink?
Once I treaded water awaiting your response. Now I feel you swimming through my very being. Once I asked for antidotes to quell the poison’s sting. Now I taste its bitter and find it rather pleasing. Once I dreamt the Pegasus would fly me from this mortal soil. Now I find that I have wings. But I won’t be anyone’s Icarus. I won’t melt when you see into me. And I will build the Babel with unholy reverence and place a flag of Love atop its crest.
We are each in this but not of this. We are each ash nestling the eggs of owlets who will see all in the dark. We are at once the ape discovering fire and too the breath of Divine that keeps it aflame. I am both the I and the We and We shall now tell you this story with our fourth eye, the one that merges every eye through which we’ve ever seen, and every voice with which we’ve cried out to you from bloody roadside rapes and white picket gates through which facades are molting skins of snakes, we are thus made clean. The onion knows the truth. Through so much weeping we are born to you anew. We are the rebirth of Prometheus and this time we don’t have to steal your fire.
Hillary Hays
June 2004
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