The Furious Sun in Her Mane: Nine Poems to Goddesses by Annie Finch

Poet’s Note: I composed this sequence of poems for performance, for chanting, and for devotion. I wanted people who would hear, read, memorize, and speak each poem to channel the original energetic patterns that the poets who best knew that Goddess used to connect with Her. So for each poem, I researched the meter and prosody of the original language in which that Goddess was first worshipped.  Then I carried the exact rhythmical pulse of Her language into my poem to Her in English.

The sequence was set to music by composer Laura Manning and choreographed by Georgia Bonatis, and I directed and performed a devotional dance collaboration version of it in 1994. That archival video of this performance has just been recovered for the first time in 31 years. It is now posted on my Youtube channel.

THE FURIOUS SUN IN HER MANE:
NINE POEMS TO GODDESSES

Originally published in Eve (Story Line Press, 1997).  Reissued in Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2013).

RHIANNON

A child is ranging, like a young horse;
a child is growing, like a gray mare.
She carries the coastal wind in her teeth
and the furious sun in her mane.

SPIDER WOMAN

Your thoughts in a web have covered the sky.
A thread from the northwest is carrying beads from the rain,
a thread from the southwest is carrying beads from the rain,
a thread from the southeast carries bright beads,
a thread from the northeast is bringing the beads
of the rain that has filled up the sky.
Spider, you have woven a chain
stretching with rain over the sky.

INANNA

A young goddess, full of love, fresh with the touch of a husband,
carrying power and rich with anger, strength, urgency, understanding,
follows the direction her ear has led her, down to the place where the underworld glistens.

At each door she removes a jewel, a belt, a ceremonial robe.
At each door, she is less and more. She bows down through the seventh door.

The young goddess is dead, and waiting. The young goddess is dead.
A goddess goes down, and I can see her. She needs to go, decides to go.
A goddess goes down, and I can hear her.

COATLIQUE

She listens for breathing
around her in the night.
Below the mountain,
families are sleeping.
When will she wake
to bring the morning?
When will she birth
sun and stars?
When will her mist
give birth to the moon?

The skulls are breathing,
as quiet in her necklace
as darkness will keep them.

BRIGID

Ring, ring, ring, ring! Hammers fall.
Your gold will all be beaten
over sudden flaming fire
moving from you, the pyre. Sweeten
your cauldron, until the sun
runs with one flame through the day
and the healing water will sing,
linger on tongues, burn away.

NUT

I cry for my lost days, I cry for my childhood,
I cry for the goddess coming down from the sky.
I cry for a place on the ground for my feet
and I call for a place on the ground for my hands.
In the daylight my hands reach out for home;
in the night, the stars connect the stones
and find their way. The shooting stars
fall from your breasts, your arms.

APHRODITE

Aphrodite, come to me,
even while I lie resting with my infant.
Cover me with your sweet certainty.

CHANGING WOMAN

If we change as she is changing,
if she changes as we change
(If she changes, I am changing)
Who is changing, as I bend
down to what the sky has sent us?
(Is she changing, or the same?)

EVE

When mother Eve took the first apple down
from the tree that grew where nature’s heart had been
and came tumbling, circling, rosy, into sin,
which goddesses were lost, and which were found?
What spirals moved in pity and unwound
across our mother’s body with the spin
of planets lost for us and all her kin?
What serpents curved their mouths into a frown,
but left their bodies twined in us like threads
that lead us back to her? Her presence warms,
and if I follow closely through the maze,
it is to where her remembered reaching spreads
in branching gifts, it is to her reaching arms
that I reach, as if for something near to praise.

BIO: Annie Finch is a poet and ritual performance artist, the award-winning author of seven books of poetry including Spells: New and Selected Poems, Eve, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses. She also edited the pioneering Choice Words: Writers on Abortion and has published books of poetic translation, poetry anthologies, poetry criticism including The Ghost of Meter and The Body of Poetry, and the poetry-writing guidebook A Poet’s Craft.  Founder of Poetry Witch Ritual Theater, she collaborates frequently with music, theater, and dance and offers workshops and performances worldwide.
Finch earned a Ph.D from Stanford University and shares her teachings online at Poetry Witchery Substack and MeterandMagic.com.