Medea: In Memoriam

I am enough.

My body will be home to my children

It is home to me as well.

I walk on my Mother and she is rich.

She let the country-dwellers sift gold from her veins,

collected in the furs of their flock.

This was until my lover arrived

and I burned from the boil in my blood.

One day, my body may burn on a pyre with flames

large enough to fill every woman’s eye

with a flicker of hope for our return to the old ways,

to the place that fostered our freedoms.

That place exists still.

It was borne from our blood,

from our tears.

We baptise our children in that blood

every time we give them to the light.

We bury their broken bodies in reverence

with the hope that they will spring forth from our Mother again,

fully formed like Thebans.

We witches burn bright upon our pyres,

piled higher than wealth,

We were often forgotten

to save room for songs of our sons

who died bleeding from their ankles.

They were never really shackled.

May our souls return to the place our fires were forged

our Chthonia:

Where the snakes coiled in our naked palms

and we howled for our sisters, their revelations and revenges

Where we buried our offerings for our mother

and mourned our poorly born.

From the Babke and Sorceresses

to the Sarmatians and Amazons,

all modern women were they

and so are we.

The world still does not stand for us

so we must stand for the world.