Two Poems: Crucifixion and Renewal by Sara Wright

(The Mark of the Bear is Upon Her)

CRUCIFIXION

Part I

She listens
to those
who intone
Betrayal
break hearts
open

love
pours golden
honey
healing
blood
soaked
wounds

truth
often
lies hidden
deep
beneath
kindly words

torment
tears holes
in fragile
skin

without
closure

spirit body
tortured
beyond
endurance
splits

soul
take
flight.

abandoned
body
weeps.

Part 2

A haze
of purple
and lime
ushers in
spring
greening
hidden
beneath
a field of
violets
a broken
woman

hangs
from
an
underground
cross

she will
not be
cut down
like he
was

her
resurrection
has not
come.

RENEWAL

At dusk
soft whoos
behind her
Chloe
‘new shoot’
climbs the Tree
of Life
purple
ribbon falls
to earth
ruby buds
meet cobalt sky
Ki is born
Kin
birthed
anew
whose
roots
remain
unscathed
unbroken
pulsing light
underground…

CONTEXT:

Betrayal without closure leaves a mourning woman suspended in thin air. No foot touches ground. Torture becomes her bedfellow. When betrayal strikes during the spring, a black hood blocks all vision cutting a woman away from hope, each green shoot.

Purple and lime precede a thousand shades of emerald green

Renewal speaks to what happens when a woman communes with a burgeoning earth at dusk while listening to Nature’s voices. First the owls sing softly through the trees.

 When the woman has a vision, she sees the black bear that visited her last year, a female  bear she loved and named Chloe before learning that the name meant new shoot.

In some mythologies Chloe was a daughter of Demeter who was associated with blooming,  others called her ‘new shoot’. Echoes of Persephone rising from the underworld

In Renewal Chloe is climbing the Tree of Life. The woman trusts the bear because she herself is wed to animal and vegetal souls. Chloe’s image is sharp and clear. A powerful female force of nature is acting as her guide.

 The woman recalls  that in Native mythologies across the northern hemisphere the bear that dies in the fall and is reborn in the spring.  Indigenous peoples believe that Black bears are also the most powerful root healers of all.  

So many possibilities… Chloe’s ascent may also mark her return from the underworld.

The bear’s intimate acquaintance with the mycorrhizal hyphae that she dens with during the winter months may help the woman heal the body she abandoned in her anguish, her most intimate kin.  Mycorrhizal mycelial roots compose the earth’s underground highway and are capable of mysteriously regenerating from fragments. They not only communicate and transport minerals etc. with the rest of the mycelial network but they carry information between all beings. underground. Renewal suggests a new way of being is possible. Listening to the flow of water on stone the woman surrenders,