Will I soften still when my blood spills?
When my skeleton is made of molten mercury blades fashioning a scream in my flesh, and the vice on my core is tightened? When my spine becomes a handle for hungry ghouls to grab and pull me down to the Underworld?
Will I soften when the Dark Goddess shows me my cocoon, spun by The Weaver’s eight legs of fate? Will I say thank you for the bitter medicine when I sleep with her gift of poison dreams?
Will I soften to face what’s been hiding there, deep beneath despair and the surface of conscious choice? Will I surrender my voice in the Well of Sacrifice where memories live?
Will I still want to give myself over to the gold of day when the crushed blue-velvet cloak of midnight soothes my skin, and the silken blanket of The Void coaxes my soul to rest?
Will I sustain the battle to remain standing and greet the Empyreal King to pass his test? Or will I bow at the feet of the Priestess of the Moon, and beg to lie down in her fields of black roses where my quiet song is found?
The Lullaby of Stillness waiting patiently underneath the pain for me to let go and descend while satin petals kiss my sullen heart. For some things have no end or beginning: they just are.
And I have traveled far to reach the edges of what I know. I found other worlds when suffering cracked me open. I’ve felt the violence of throwing myself into the volcano’s fire and burning alive that I might transform.
Oh, that sweet Alchemy might take me home to what I truly am.
The Land of I, dissolving in the mist to form the dew upon the Sacred Rose and all her kin. The color of blood and tears when they grow out of the shadows and into sunlight, who only returns when darkness has had her time to nurture them with silence.
Only then can the Divine Garden be kept by one who has bled and wept, that The Mother may gather those seeds deep in her womb, and The Keeper may gently sing her roses to bloom.
A Song of Softness endowed to the one who found the hint of light gleaming in the dark when she rendered the struggle into the arms of Night.
Copyright © Sheyorah Naify, 2021
Art: Keeper of Dreams by Galia Alena.
Author’s Note: Empyreal means celestial, heavenly or sublime, or of or relating to the firmament. More archaicly, in Greek history, it spoke of a fiery place as the highest realm of the heavens.
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