Saturday, February 5, 2022

Loreena McKennitt- Kecharitomene

Warrior Women

We are the warrior women

We, who conquer fears

Except the one that comes at night

That creeps in with our tears.

The fear that quietly says to us

“You’ll never know a man

Who’ll love you like you need to be

Who’ll fit the master plan.”

That fear that does not talk to us

In daylight, morn or noon

But waits to torment us with night

In silent streams of moon.

Our days are filled with woman’s work

With care, concern and chore

We take care of the ones we love

And cry inside for more.

We feed and clothe and garden

We shop and sew and mend

We wait for love to pass us by

And notice us again.

We drive and file and organize

We wash and iron and fold

We open windows to the warmth

And bar them from the cold.

We cook and bake and regulate

We pay unending bills

We kiss away the little hurts

And nurse away the ills.

We fall in tired and weary beds

With day just hours away

Escape to dreams made out of hopes

That waking tongues can’t say.

Warriors, all we, in this world

Fierce and bold and strong

Women, soft and sad and wise

Who see the right and wrong.

We slay the daily dragons

Protect the innocent

Stand up to the unjust ones

From whom our woes are sent.

There isn’t much that we can’t do

If we are forced to do it

We grit our teeth, roll up our sleeves

And then we just get to it.

Warrior women, young and old

And black and white and brown

Yellow, tan and all between

They cannot keep us down.

Except at night, when shadows walk

And heartache makes it’s call

It’s then we let our hearts run loose

It's then, sometimes we fall.

It’s not that we cannot exist

Without a man to hold

But life without love’s tender touch

Soon withers and dies old.

Warrior women, without love

Stand strong against the world

Keeping order with stoic face

That conceals the little girl.

We need some shoulders to lean on

And loving, seeing eyes

That know it’s time to hold us close

When the warrior in us cries.

We are the warrior women

We overcome the pain

But the little girls in us need love

Until we’re strong again.

©by Voo Shining Stone

Aug 19, 2010

9:44 p.m.

Warrior Women

Warrior Spirit by Selena Cross

used by her permission

Knocking Down the Walls

When I was born,
They didn't know what to do with me
I wasn't an ordinary kid
I liked the extraordinary, the different, the bizarre
I needed things they didn't know how to give me
And yet they loved me with all of their hearts.

As I grew older, I began to explore
The universe within my self,
The universe outside my self
The universe beyond myself.

I didn't know where I fit in
Or how to fit in, or if I fit in,
Or if I ever would fit in
And so I stopped trying to fit in
And I became myself.

The teen aged years were.....
Shall I say, unhinged?
I was a door that didn't know if
I wanted to be open or shut
So I just kind of hung there halfway open,
Halfway shut, half way longing to know
What I didn't know and halfway hoping
That I would never find out.

Because it was a lonely place
Populated by one
Though one with an imaginary community
Of millions, billions, even.........
Of wonderful, awful, fantastic entities
Ambling through my mind
On their way to some place else.

Most of the time, I felt broken
And broken in a way that no earthly doctor
Could fix
A Borg-like creature from another dimension
With a mechanical brain
And hands that could not touch,
But a human heart that felt oh, so much.

My room, my house, my school, my town
My world...........
Felt small to me and hardly welcoming
A place to exist while I went searching
For the place that felt like home.

I knew too much
And yet never enough
For there was a hunger in me
That nothing could satisfy
And nothing could fulfill
The walls were always so close
I could reach out my hands in the dark
And touch them, touch the ceiling
Touch my own thoughts
As they echoed back and forth to me
In the box that was my life.

But then one day
I learned a secret
And not just any secret
But the secret to me
And what I was and what I would become
And what I would always want to be.

I stood up there one night in the dark
And I took an invisible hammer
And I began to knock down the walls
That held me in, that held me back
And I began to see what I could not see before
Because it was invisible to unseeing eyes
And hidden from unknowing minds.

I began to hammer away at the tangible
Until I broke through to the intangible
And uncovered the unseen, un-tasted world
That was there all the time beyond a veil
Of thinnest silk, on the other side of my soul.

And I became
And I became
And I became......me
Out of the box, out of the four walls of a room
Full of emptiness.

And to my wondering eyes, I beheld
Others there like me, others there that had been
Searching all of their lives
For someone to tell them who they were
And why they were and where they were going
And why they were like they were
Some one like me.

And I began to tell them what I knew
And they began to answer questions
I had never asked
But needed desperately to know
And it was wonderful...........
It was the beginning of a new day
And a new world..........
And I flung the door wide open at last
And I walked in.

Orange Sky by Alexi Murdoch

Birds In Cages

Birds In Cages

Like birds in cages, poets, we
Feel the constriction
Feel the confined allocation
Feel the terror of the bars
Be they gilded or gold.

Like birds in cages, poets, we
The thought writers
The thought readers
The thought muses
Write until we can write no more.

Like birds in cages, poets, we
The loving but skillfully living unloved
Souls, divided yet fuller than most
Compose our sonnets, find our voices
And in our cages, from broken hearts, we sing.