In this decade, I’ve regained

my hands

my tongue

my blood

my feet.

In this decade, I stopped sinking into the marsh

as if it was my lover, as if

it was the only way to find peace.

In this past decade, I dared

to cry with Ereshkigal, rather than just hang there

on that meat hook, stripped.

I prostrated on the floor of the underworld and re-membered

my bodysoul from the darkness.

In this decade, the jettisoned and trapped feminine grew wings

and I practiced opening and closing them on the shoreline of my childhood

for an entire winter

before the strength to lift off from the darkness and ascend to the top soil

was released from my DNA.

In this past decade, I rose up

as an embodiment of the sublime, beyond the limitations of fixed notions

pressed

upon body and gender.

In this decade,

my womb blood gained its imaginal rights to participate

in the soul-making of my personhood and path

unshackled from reproduction, pathology, social constructs, spiritual bypass,

and green juice.

In this past decade,

the wandering of my inner Aletis, heroine in search of a place to be her true self,

found refuge along the Hudson river.

I nested and opened doors

to the liberation of sisters.

In this decade, the wild moon Virgin within

gnawed free, dropped armor, and underwent a parthenogenesis –

birthing (sublime, moving) Her fullness out

into, of, and for the sake of

the soul of the world – and

love.

Tell me your mythopoetic decade . . .

Invite in myth, fairytale, archetypal images, dreams, animal presences, symbolic figures that give shape and resonance to your own personal mythic life. There is soul-making and poetry in the narrative dips, turns, meanderings, endings, beginnings, and being. Write it as if you were writing to the divine, to your familiar, to your inner child, to your ancestors. Write it as if you were writing to your soul. Write it as if you were making an offering the the great work of being and becoming with the full, intersectional, complex vital beauty of this world.