Poetry – Page 12 – Feminism and Religion

More Biblical Poetry by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

This is the 3^rd in a series of Biblical poetry where I am “translating” verses of the Bible. You can read the first two here: Biblical Poetry and Biblical Poetry, Part 2.

One of my primary purposes of doing this work is to strip away patriarchal veneers that have been layered upon original teachings. I reach into ancient pagan knowledge in order to reclaim what I believe to have been lost.

Below is each verse in 3 versions. First is the King James Version (KJV) for familiarity, the second is Jeff Benner’s Mechanical Translation (Benner) which uses a consistent translation for each word. I use his translations to get a better sense of how the words originally fit together.[i]

Biblical Poetry, Part 2 by Janet MaiKa’i Rudolph

Last month, I wrote about a new project I have been playing with which is to re-write biblical verses as spiritual poetry rather than follow along with stricter translations (although truth be told, my translations have never been strict). My main goal is to strip away the layers of patriarchy that grew up around universal, earth-based, mystical lessons. In my last blogpost I wrote about why I translate El (god in English versions) as All-Potential Powers. You can read it here: https://feminismandreligion.com/2021/04/15/biblical-poetry-by-janet-maikai-rudolph/

I have written before about my translation of YHVH as mother/father creator. You can read that here: https://feminismandreligion.com/2019/03/05/eve-by-any-other-name-by-janet-rudolph/

YHVH, the sacred 4 letter tetragrammaton, is always translated as LORD in the bible. It is truly a wondrous name with many layers of meaning which the English one-word term LORD doesn’t capture. I find that the English translations of these two words – LORD and god – are dull and without sacred energetic aspects. In ancient times, the words used to depict divinity in general, and YHVH specifically, were meant to be intoned and chanted.

How I Learned to Grow Wings by Marie Cartier

April 2021, Poem

Visibility is

this body opening against itself over and over… an existence moving through fibers was

the one thing I had. When was the time…breathe in? Breathe out.

My existence to myself was the most political act. You can’t erase me. I exist for myself.

I am thirteen. I stand next to my father and say, “Don’t you touch me. Don’t you ever touch me again.” My mother stands by the sink, her hand reaches out and clutches its edge. My father sits and looks up

at me. He opens his mouth and closes it. I turn away, expecting his hand to land across my back.

I imagine me falling. But that doesn’t happen. Not that day.

That day I stood up. Said no, turned my back and walked away. I am a political act.

I am a body with a voice and I heard myself speaking for myself when no one else would, I said no.

No is the most beautiful word in the English language for a woman who learns its power.

The spell of no. I cast it when I was thirteen.

The gaze is

when they saw me. I started to erase myself, I was without fingers first. They kept finding me, so

I erased my hands. They kept seeing me, so I erased my arms. They kept locating me, so I erased my feet and my legs. But they kept finding me. I erased my secret places between my legs—what they most wanted. I erased my belly so I wouldn’t be seen eating, and my breasts so I would not be noticed as

a girl. But they found me anyway. I erased my neck and my head disappeared.

All that was left was my shoulders. I felt the weight of their gaze, and everything they wanted and took. And so, I lifted my shoulders, and I found my wings.

And I flew, and in flight, I let all of my parts come home.

A woman flying was the one thing they never thought to look for. But I found her. And she was me.

Wood Frog Mother by Sara Wright

Dead Cedar
Week after week
heat, wind, sun,
shrinks vernal pools.
Ditches are dry.
Denizens
of wet forest,
masked gold leaves,
seek shallow depressions
fed by Spring.

One night the
heat wave breaks
I smell rain,
hear hoarse croaks.
I stand there
swallowing sound
inhaling fragrant air
Lamenting absence –
so many voices stolen
by drought.

ctrl F: goddess, women, woman. Selected poems 2012-2021 by Elizabeth Cunningham

I began writing quarterly posts for FAR in July 2012. The poems below are selected from journals kept during these nine years. As indicated, I searched for the words goddess, women, woman. April is poetry month, but I also realize that right now I don’t have any essays in me. Sometime this year, I may embark on my first nonfiction project. In spite of and/or because of that new focus, this post is my last as a regular FAR contributor. I am grateful for having been a reader and writer in this community. Thank you and much love to you all.

Broken Mothers by Sara Wright

I awakened under clouds
feeling respite from fierce
heat in April that
forced maple, birch,
beech, and poplar
to bud and burst.

First we planted
Balsam seedlings;
He climbed birch
to saw off
dying trunks,
some broken
beyond recognition,
wreckage from
the ice storm
a winter holocaust
that stole my peace,
my trust in white,
deep restful sleep.

An Untitled Poem for Unanswerable Questions by Eva Espinoza

Thinking about the discourse between spiritualists and victims of harm
Thinking about accountability and prison abolition
Thinking about how white supremacy tells us people are disposable
That they–that we, don’t matter
Thinking about “don’t speak ill of the dead”
Thinking about “honor your ancestors”
Thinking about what else is possible beyond prisons, cages, and borders
Thinking about abusers who refuse to take accountability
Thinking about where that leaves us when we die
Throat’s closed
Stories Untold
Thinking about how death is possible for the living
Thinking about how redemption is possible for the dead
Thinking about, what the fuck even is Salvation, anyway?
Thinking about binaries and how exhausting it is to think of these two things as mutually exclusive to each other
Thinking about how many of us are dissociating because cognitive dissonance is hell on earth
Thinking about the waging of war and how it lives in the body
Thinking about how rage turned inwards is depression
Thinking about the will to live and the will to die
Thinking about the sleep of death and the dreams that come from dying
Thinking about regret
Thinking about when an abuser becomes an ancestor
Thinking about where the guilt goes in the afterlife
Thinking about hell
Thinking about eternal suffering
Thinking about conversations of the reconciliation that is possible between an abusive ancestor and those they’ve abused
Thinking about who the hell said this shit was tied to the land of the living

This poem is a birthing after months of sitting in grief circles and bible studies and with the ancestors.This poem is short but holds so many wrestlings. It holds the wrestling between me and my daddy, now an ancestor, who I could never come out to while he walked this earth. It holds the waiting for my biological father’s passing to reconcile the ways in which he harmed me and my mother and my sister, the ways in which he abandoned and neglected us. It holds the wrestlings of iconizing Kobe Bryant after his death while also naming and recognizing him as the sexual predator he was. It holds the wrestlings of what happens in the afterlife, blending theologies of indigeneity and christianity.

I Heard my Own Siren Song, and Followed It (a poem) by Marie Cartier

They didn’t know I was a mermaid.

That I had a siren song.

That I could lure, and I could kill.

And that I would eventually

because – I was a mermaid.

When my father tried to throw my brother

down a flight of stairs, I jumped on him.

Six feet tall. I was ten years old.

But I had the tail. He had

nothing. Against. All. I. was.

I was a sea creature. I was kind,

but I was still a sea creature. So, when another

brother asked, who do you think you are?

I hit him hard so he would know

he had to listen. If I told him to hide, he had to hide. I

was a mermaid. I had a tail.

I wouldn’t be there forever.

High Desert Sojourn by Sara Wright

I longed to re-visit
the desert – my first
journey left me
with a longing for
wide open spaces,
a blue sky dome,
a bowl of stars at night,
so to return 25 years later
was to complete
an unfinished story.
Now I could live among
the stately rock
stark white columns,
conical reptilian hills,
pink and purple sands,
ragged weeds,
Cactus People,
thorns and stickers,
delicate yellow flowers,
under a moon that rarely slept?

Some nights I missed the dark.
I always missed the Bear
I dismissed the longings
in my body,
Things were different here.

Maybe I could escape
the grief of dying trees,
stripped mountains,
a shrinking wilderness
too many gunmen
the loss of dreams?

That first November
I heard a haunting –
Crane calls
as they touched
down at nightfall.
My bones sang.
How I longed
to meet the bird
whose voice
sent lightening chills
through every nerve.

Continue reading “High Desert Sojourn by Sara Wright”

A Shared Bridge by Lou Hartmann and Diana

A fellow college classmate, Diana, and I wrote this poem together as we were inspired by the likes of Adrienne Rich and Sara Ahmed. We wanted to touch on the animosity between trans folk and cis women that often exists between them, and bridge our collective and often shared feelings of joy, rage and injustice into writing. We welcome you to walk the bridge with us.

Pt. 1

What is a woman? A woman can’t satisfy.
Because if she’s not “woman” enough in one aspect or the other she’s not deserving of that title at all.
Gender is a societal construct so I wouldn’t really know how to define a woman.
For many, being a woman means that her brain is in between her legs but how do we persuade them that it’s fucking not?
I know a lot of women who aren’t born with the biology of what a woman is expected to be
I know a lot of women who don’t have breasts, who don’t carry typical reproductive organs within their systems.

Continue reading “A Shared Bridge by Lou Hartmann and Diana”