Dear FAR readers, here is a selection from my new collection Holding Our Brokenness, a gathering of poems. I chose these particular poems for their connection to feminism and/or religion. I hope you will enjoy them.
The Old One Speaks
You must be unmade here inside my grey cloak inside my cold womb here where the ice forms and breaks at the river’s edge.
What Kali Tells Me
It’s all in the rhythm. Falseness throws you off beat. Rhythm renews your strength with every step. That’s how time becomes timelessness.
Step by step,
we make our way.
Breath by breath,
we choose.
Day by day,
we see where we are.
Let us remember
that we do not really finish anything,
we tumble with the turning
which is right where we belong.
It is now in this liminal space between the cauldron and the cave, as obligation struggles to come roaring back into center, that we sense what we truly need whispering beneath the surface of all that clamors to co-opt our time and all that howls to claim our attention. Stand steady. Inhabit your own wholeness. Cast a one word spell of power: return. Step into the sacred right where you are. Re-collect yourself. Reclaim your right to your own life. Defend your edges. Give clarity space to crystallize and your own knowing space to emerge. It is vital, this work of reclamation. Hold it holy. Let the knots unravel. Set yourself free.
1. On a sunny Elul afternoon I kneel at your grave a sprig of rue in my pocket. I recite a tkhine for visiting the graveyard and imagine that you know this ritual– stretching string to calculate the space your body inhabits. The unspooling wick rests gentle on rough-cut grass, touching the edges of mortality, its twists separating and connecting worlds: the dead and the living the past and the now mine and yours, a woman I never met, a writer dead these 40 years.
There’s a fascist in the White House — a malevolent clown and front man for a cabal of the hard right. Their takeover of the US government proceeds rapidly, a stunning succession of defeats for democracy.
The nightmares of fascism are taking shape in waking reality. Now is the time, I tell myself, to speak up, speak out, name the perpetrators, name their games.
The bully in the White House has been called a rapist, and fascism is patriarchy on steroids, waging unremitting war on nature, people of color, and women.
then I am holy. Made of moonbeams and shadows, darkness and light, questioned and answered, lost and retrieved;
discovered remains
If I am The Mother
then I am a reflection, a depiction, an inflexion of a cosmos in bliss and chaos, birth and destitution; a primordial sound unleashed to form planet, life, and
you and me
If I am The Mother
then I am fermented in humanity, and sour the illusions of precipices we’re told that
I went to the lake this morning, seeking the peace, sustenance, and perspective it so often provides. I had been particularly distressed and distraught the day before after watching the documentary on Christian Nationalism, “Bad Faith.” It was chilling to say the least. Among other things, the film demonstrates the longevity of Christian Nationalism in this country, dating back at least to the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865. However, the central theme of the documentary is the staggering influence of conservative political operative Paul Weyrich, who orchestrated the merger of conservative Evangelical Christians with the Republican Party in the 1980s. He founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, the Heritage Foundation which authored Project 2025, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Council for National Policy – all of which seek to undermine democracy in order to bring about what these organizations and their followers call a “Christian nation,” by force if necessary. But as former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt states in the film, there is nothing “Christian” about this movement. It is pure nationalism, a striving for power requiring the dismantling of the institutions of democratic government as we know them. These extremist Republican strategists found a powerful base of voters by tapping into Evangelical Christians and manipulating the messages they received to fill them with fear, and found just the puppet they needed in the charismatic and amoral figure of Donald Trump. As we’ve seen in recent years, they have been quite successful in the destruction of government. After filling the Supreme Court with their chosen nominees during Trump’s first term, getting Christian Nationalist Mike Johnson installed as Speaker of the House, and getting Trump elected a second time despite the January 6th insurrection, or perhaps because of it, they are now successfully dismantling or otherwise destroying the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Energy, Defense, Agriculture, Justice and more along with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Federal Regulatory Agency. . . the list goes on. It’s all part of the plan to fulfill the “Seven Mountain Mandate” of dominionism[i], which seeks to impose its beliefs in seven spheres of influence: religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. As one of the Christian Nationalists interviewed in the film proudly said, “It’s the Christian Taliban.”
I am a pupil of this thing we call life. Swelling and swollen with the capacity to transform and to be transformed by language: Logos Incarnate=Word Made Flesh. Fleshy is this thing. And I am fully aware that Word sculpts me. Oft-times seeks an answer to the query: to what is my life tied? My response is bound with choice. I must forever remember choice. Choice that comes ever clearer the more mis-takes I have made, the sharper the dynamic degrees of un-learning weld my heart to my intellect in a new way. Age-ing and Sage-ing too, sturdy accomplices in this rollicking and rocky gavotte HERe on the body of Godde: Earth. Earth HERself ever evolving and unfolding. Mysteriously. Meticulously. With slow and un-seen purpose. Tied we are the HER and our choices. Each expressions of this vitally significant relationship.
On my way to the Keynote I was invited to share with the John Howard Society, I watched the summer heat and haze emboldened by the relentless forest fires in Western Canada, finger its way in Central Canada, brush strokes of clotted air painting the sky a raw grey, causing lungs to feel the squeeze, noting that the beauty of the vastness of the un-burning forests through which I was being driven, was in no way diminished, curtailed, or truncated. Trees. Roots down deep. Sipping moisture. Sharing, far below the Earth, millennia of silent stories. Of as yet un-tapped Wisdom. Breathing us. Beckoning us, who journey upon and with HER to listen. And listen closely. Ask. Listen. Do that.
Moderator’s Note: This is the final part of Sara’s poem that was posted last week. You can read it here.
Part 1
She burned in raging fires swamped by merciless floods crossed mountains of grief so wide so deep crushed Silence in her sleep unknowingly accompanied by Owls and Winter Wren Marked by Bear’s sharp Protective Claws Circles of Fire
Feminism and Religion 