Mourning. {poetry}
{source}
When a loved one dies, a grief process is inevitable.
I noticed my psyche experiencing grief waves when the eruption of contagion signaled a collective and individual change — well, an ending of what we have known, of what no longer serves us, and the necessity of sacrifice. For this poet, comes the task of acknowledging the bigger picture while painfully holding the other side of the opposites — the mourning for our suffering race.
This poem was a result of coming out of a grief wave, which in my case manifested as a fever. I then remembered I had written one similar in the countryside of France, 2002, where I lived. In that poem, which I submit as a prologue to the more recent one, I acknowledged Mother Earth’s holy rage. In this recent poem, her holy germs.
These poems are in my lowly, well, my humble perspective, signifying the change that has been coming for decades. Foremost is the feeling value or intuition or knowing from the collective soul that mankind has been forgiven for our negligence and something Else is taking over. I know others feel the same.
For all poets, it may new time to be heard; a wonderful time returning to the bards and gleemen of times so past and so forgotten.
Prologue to “Mourning, March, 20, 2020”
July 14, 2002
Her Rage repressed
Could hold no more.
Detonating heavens roared.
She flashed,
Crashing waves from above;
Madness pounding
The square of La Calmette.
Sheets of tears released,
Funneling gullies;
Anguish drenching
The Earth’s floor.
“No more!” She wept,
“No more war.”
Shakedowns from branches
Stoned the forest path.
Winds screamed,
“Dead plums in the night!”
Breakdowns of stalks
Swept to swollen rivers.
Downpour roared,
“Corn rotted to the roots!”
All this —
The torrent of Her wrath,
Her truth.
I heard the peasant say it in a dream,
C’est le déluge du Nature,
Notre Terre, Notre Mère.
And in those corner rooms
Behind locked shutters,
Children huddled lost
From a lost summer.
Flickering lights from their TV
Speckled shadows on their faces
While night storms raged —
The bolts of Her electric madness
Swallowed shadows on the square
And children in the arms
Of their bewildered mothers
Sniffled, Maman, pourquoi?
We are silent.
The farmers, the students, the teachers;
The mothers; the fathers,
The leaders, the followers;
The ignorant, the wise.
Gnostics, agnostics,
The faithful, the knowing;
The poet, the madman, the thief.
We are stunned, we are silent;
Such is the pressure
Of our unacknowledged grief.
But yes, we know why.
Somewhere in the linings
Of our storm clouds
We know Her —
The great Earth,
And incubus of life;
The reception of our deaths and births,
The chalice of our ashes and our bones,
The breast from which food flows;
The quencher of our thirst
The glory for our eyes
The music to our ears
The reverence to our nature;
Our fear,
The fear.
Oh Mother!
We shudder
In Her first light to the last
(The dawn of our resurrection
The dusk of our end)
So that we may begin again —
If only through her benevolence—
The only Mother of us all
The one Mother of us all
In whom we are born to trust.
The One we have betrayed.
And now Her torrential rage,
Held in Her Belly
Since her molecules were split
And before
And before
And before
Since we crucified her Myth,
Now is Her Storm
And our alarm.
How long has she waited for our
Confession, our amends?
Where is our shame?
Shall we repent?
Or be drowned in her unceasing rains?
The poet kneels before her Mass
A piece of dust, an ash
While roots are washed
Away from home
As Her Groans
Rumble like a fever breaking
Into the lost summer of our Age
Rumbling on and on and on
Her holy
Holy rage.
***
Mourning, March 20, 2020
Last night I stepped out of time.
Time in whose country the fearful ego is housed.
Not to say I won’t feel the fear of my anguishing race
But yea, it is the sorrow of millennia.
Let me mourn her, this Earth who can no longer wait
For the metanoia of mankind;
Whose womb dispels the rotten placenta of one age
Making way for another in her own time.
Let me mourn with open heart as my heart still beats
Ker thump ker thump, the pulse of humanity.
Let me disinfect
Oh mother virgin crone
The mantle of your soil my flesh
And your moonlit starlit dome
Let us find our home
This impossible made possible
By your forgiveness even though
We failed you —
We failed you, mother father son
When we fell asleep
To what needed to be done.
But we have always slept
With the barbiturates of greed
And plowed our way
With amphetamines of speed
And had our say
With our compulsion to breed.
Until your earth could hold no more.
Until your waters drenched your shores
Until your fires licked our trees
Until you took away the bees
And birds who found themselves diseased
Until you disallowed our touch
Hand to hand, mouth to mouth
And tore away our need to earn
With your contagion, holy germs!
I am breath and blood and flesh
I am tears and cries and fears
I am a gut clenched in fight
To submerge the truth of fright
But it is clear
You are here
With beams of love
That breaks apart
Our human heart
Last night I stepped outside of time
Minutes became centuries
Ten thousand years became right now
And mourning the epiphany
As clenching pain released —
Acknowledging the grief
Accepting pain is what it is
And only this could give relief.
Today I pray
The poets
Now can have their say.
Taliesin, The Songs of Trees, Ovid and Euripides
Hesiod and Theognis
Sing eulogies and elegies
Or let your verse run free and wild—
You and you, scribes of Soul —
Heralding the new born child.
All singing so eventually
Together we will turn the key
Unlocking what is mystery
In these times of letting go
Of all that is not meant to Be.
***
Pamela Preston, a student of Carl Jung, Robert Graves, and the dead poets and philosophers, embarked on a literary, mythological quest in 1992 with a typewriter and a one-way ticket for Paris, France. Based in the French countryside for 20 years, Ms. Preston continues living and writing her personal myth in a world that is losing its agrarian culture and its legends. She adheres to the words of C.G. Jung, “… a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows.” Pamela’s books and mandalas can be found on Marianne Press and Mythic Threads.
***
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