Don't Let Them

Don't let them make you feel ashamed.
These shatter-lines on your broken mirror
are a tree of wounds, bearing fruit
that is both poison and power.
In you, shame-merchants see fractals
of their own confusion.
Don't let them disgrace you
with your own blood,
this ribbon of honor unwinding 
through a telltale furrow
in the vale of your flesh.
You are the bruised brooch your mother
pinned to her nipple, a diamond amulet
gleaming at midnight with ancestral faces.
Listen to the crystal whisper of her pain,

it is your pain, the incomparable
suchness of a single syllable
containing all the cries in your given name.
Don't let them abash you

for you boundaries.
You need them to glisten,
even when you collapse
to the floor of your heart,
splayed like a mop on linoleum,
soaked in your particular infamy.
Each fallen sparrow is a tear of the moon.
Don’t be ashamed to savor
the fragrance of your rage,
the musk of your desire,
to ravel up the labyrinth of the constellations
in your own inscrutable knot.
For the clustered starry hot mess
of your self-revelation,
is the only universe you have.
To weave these stained ragged threads

of seeing into one immaculate gaze,
the particular attention you pay
to particulars,

does not make you impure.

You have a right to call
the breath of the Goddess
your own breath, a right to feel
her widening roar in your solar plexus,
the rise of her impeccable smile
from your sacrum
in a blossom of black tears.
No law commands you to bend
before the patriarchs of shame.

You merely have a choice:
shame them back, or inhale their pain,
breathe in their grief,  the feathery smoke
of their charred wings.
Then breathe out a benediction.

Daughter, let darkness have
her deepening way with you,
immerse you and drown you,

until your tremor of silence sings
an embryo of light.

Let her birth you again.

Painting, 'Beloved,' by Gabriel Dante Rosetti