Dark Chocolate Mother's Day Poem

 

This Mother’s Day poem is dark chocolate,

not vanilla. Flecked with ayahuasca.
Whether you are man or woman,

or both man and woman,

or you rest in the sexless splendor

at the center of the rose with

Adam and Lilith, swimming

in a bright obsidian seed,

honor the Motherhood within you.

Her fury is a ripple in the ocean

of the black chanterelle.

She has become your breath

so that you can make offerings and sing

the one thousand names of her silence,

beginning with Nightshade,

ending with Osmium.

She is the hollow thread of three a.m.

that runs up your spine,

filling you with lightning.

She'll let you whirl with the mercury serpent

who is ravenous for your ashes and bones.

What gets snuffed out?

Only the flickering of your ambivalence,

the fear of wanting.

Now give birth to your own body,

a flame engendering its candle,

causation flowing backward

in an angry river of exultation.

The full moon of wisdom gazes

from your forehead while you sleep,

silent and golden, the sunrise in your belly.

A tear of sorrow in your right eye,
a tear of jubilance in your left,

you see through the veil of this world.

You become the Mother’s smile,

healing both rich and poor,

the violent and the voiceless,

refreshing every creatures with a new name.

Your dream dissolves in the ineffable

beauty of awakening.

On the hinge of your heartbeat

swings the gate to her garden.

Your children always die before you,

yet your emptiness sparkles with the unborn,

like night.

No need to forget, and nothing to remember.

Between the last breath and this one,

the sky is cloudless, radiant

as ten thousand wombs.

Painting by Frida