Re-Knitted
Earth-wined me.
This image of being earth-wined
causes the words to stop flowing,
the image so powerful
my soul must stop to drink it in,
this purple sun syrup
flowing down my throat.
I smell earth in this syrup and taste earth in its pearls.
My skin reeks of earth.
Stained.
Re-knitted. Yes.
To my Body. And Her Body.
The Crow outside caws as I sit with pen in hand and earth in mouth.
She, too, is re-knitted back to me.
Crow. My Sister.
Black and wise and crosser of thresholds,
She takes me down into the Belly
where I’m stained by this heady earth wine.
She caws loudly,
reminding me of the pleasure of the dark,
this place where my true baptism takes place.
Another voice rises up out of the crow’s mouth,
a black womb with wings and beak.
Just a whisper, at first,
I crane my neck to hear.
Words, if you can call them that,
rumble around in this black womb.
Coming into being,
they vibrate and reverberate against
the  ageless black-stained walls of this holy womb.
I draw closer to the Crow’s mouth,
wanting to miss nothing.
With one shrill caw She sucks me in and
I fall into this heady soup.
I swim in her dark-stained belly.
I become crow’s lunch.
I decay into a million pieces of black,
holes that hold the light of a trillion stars.
(C) Julie M Daley
::
Image is ‘As the Crow Flies’ by Jimmy Brown under Creative Commons 2.0
Many new poems were born out of the first circle of Writing Raw, both for myself and for the women in the circle.
This one I’m sharing with you today was born during Writing Raw.
The poem that ignited this piece is AÂ Berry Entire by Pattiann Rogers.
Catalyst phrases from the poem are ‘purple sun syrup’ and ‘earth-wined’.