I Have Made a Place for You

DARK MOON,
September 25, 2022

December 2019

She stands before the large white paper,  a refugee.  Flashes of grade school, bottles of paint all around her, big fat brushes, tiny scissors, cup of water, the air hollow around her shaking body. The tremor invisible, until the evening when her teeth rattle with the discharge of adrenaline until it spends itself.  

Her guy wires cut, she wonders where is place, where on earth is home?  Where is He?  Her roots, and all those fine golden threads that linked her to life, to him, to place, severed.  Her body a gourd, dead seeds rattle in the hollow of her.

Liquid heaps of blue, brown, black, gold appear on the paper plate.

Refuge, where are you, who are you.  She aches so.  Someone told her once, years ago, when suffering, put your head in the lap of the Mother.  What Mother she asks herself, I can’t find the Mother.  Abide they say, Abide.

Blue sky, brown earth of the Holy Mother.  I am painting a lie, she thinks.  Abide they say.

This Mother is large, a giant.  Vast as the plowed fields, sturdy as the Grandmother Oaks she has lived with for thirty years, steady as a mountain.  Mountain Mother sits. Mountain Mother murmurs. 

I have made a place for you.  Milk honey blood.  I have made a place for wracking pain.  For scoured  for hollow for lost for hopeless for despair.  For rage  for hate for never never never. And for love.  For love.  Come, I have made a place for you.

Wary as a feral cat, the woman who grieves scales the warm brown body of The Mother who endures.  The Mother of decay and rot. The Mother of the ill and dying. Of birth, of life, of death, of sorrow. 

She sighs herself into the dark loamy lap.  Refuge, for a while.  Refuge.