Tuesday, December 23, 2014

THREE SPIRITS FATHERING CHRISTMAS
























THREE SPIRITS


[e]M Body, what she dreams of living
EROS points where

   **********


With each touch
Maggie's name dissolved

in blood where
"blood is good."

Between us,
"the blood is good," she said.

Yet, in language where it flowed "good"
she and I were parted.

O, the untouchable, nascent body, how it bled
how our virgin body fell between us

shade--spaced as if not enough mattered,
an expanding verse lay between us.

   **********


In embodied body
when blood is good

O
shapes presence still & O

namelessly placed, does matter.




©2014 Old Long Since (But Should Old Acquaintance Be forgot?) stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#mythopoetics #AuldLangSyne #ChristmasSpirit


notes

from Myth & Culture Blog, Maggie Macary,”Telling My Story”, an excerpt from the blog, BloodInk, see  The Internet Archives

 http://web.archive.org/web/20020907171119/http://www.tellingmystory.com/OurStories/mmacary_bloodink.htm

[quote]
“Is my life created gunk? I wonder how much of what I remember is an artificial creamer used to delude me into thinking I’ve got something good here. I sip again on the ginger tea, and realize as it begins to heat the passage of my di-stressed digestive system, that all the memories of my life, all the bits and fragments and pieces that I think I’ve lost or forgotten or put away in the box with my old poems and old diaries, faded pictures and tattered greeting cards, are actually right here. They are present in the cells and the structure, the wounds and the scars of my exhausted body. All memory for me begins with my body, ends with my body, and circles around my body. There is no other story in my life except what is written in the structure of my body. I take another sip begin to wonder if I’m truly ready to speak. For so many years of my life, my voice was stilled and I felt strangulated. But those moments of strangulation felt somehow comforting and safe. No need for me to speak. No need for me to risk anything. There have been moments in my life when I lost my voice for days on end, unable to whisper a word, safe in a silence that held all the blood pounding inside me; a tight hold with no release. I recall other moments of my life getting comforted by a scarf tied tightly around my neck; the scarf somehow holding in a voice that I thought was too powerful, too destructive, too intense.
I held my intensity and my voice and my blood inside my body, and sat on the rocks of my own fevered imagination, gazing out at a barren ocean and mourning for a home that seemed lost forever. Until one day, I risked it all and dove in dark waters, determined to find my way home. For years, I swam and swam in that barren sea in desperate search for some little bit of truth about the tragedies of my life. At times, I thought I would give up, allowing the pieces of my life to fall like wreckage upon the waves. But some goddess always seemed to come through to save me. Some ancient female voice would whisper to me from the deep water, “The blood is good.” ~ Maggie Macary

[unquote]

Monday, December 15, 2014

FROM THE CUPBOARD OF HESTIA, THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

YESTERDAY I SPENT IN THE KITCHEN BAKING FOR
CHRISTMAS. PICTURED ARE THREE VARIATIONS ON
KIFLE, AN HEIRLOOM COOKIE RECIPE TAUGHT ME.
THE RECIPE, LIKE THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS ITSELF,
HANDED ON AND LEARNED BY HEART. AS I PULLED
TRAY AFTER TRAY OF COOKIES FROM THE OVEN, I
BEGAN TO THINK ABOUT THE FIRE OF HESTIA...

































LAST NIGHT I BAKED ANCESTRAL KIFLE



a feast, King Wenceslas pulled in titular
reach, oven door breached
gathering winter's fuel

©2014 Heirloom Poetics stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#ohj #ohjDailWords #3lines #micropoetry #mythopoetics


notes


Thursday, December 4, 2014

DECEMBER GOBLET










HE TALKED ABOUT ARCHETYPAL ENCOUNTERS
To My Father



Poetic imagination
a fathering spirit &
son to himself,

but in likeness
unborn; what comes
to material existences

forms a kingdom
of spirit moving over the face
of that deep but bodiless

poet, poetry
where the slaying
of deity happens.

Nonsense matters dema
(dema)teria material, the distant closeness
of bodiless things

spreads throughout all materiality.
A dema spirit of depths works
where not-language matters.

Divine pregnancies (& deaths)
open gates of heaven
using extraordin



airy pause
(for nonsense matters to poetizing form)
and it makes us human.

**********

That matters to the poet
first and most
for his life―de

ep
ends on it. (Just as life
here depends on it.)

***********

Boats are we
but our sail is red & sea-parted
are we


rowing towards
a proper burial 
what we will have lived.
Yes, empty your life overboard
so it remains here
when you sail away

(and you will, won’t you?)
Our want is ever faithful
to this unborn, poetizing  

dema
teria
material;

the proper burial
of one’s immaterial material
left behind; left here.

In the end
[he said]
the most we can do

is tell stories
and of that want
he said

[he rubbed his belly then]

“I keep it here.”
                          [She said,]
“Go about the world now
& gather yourself
into an immanent immortality
an autobiography in red




©2014 What He Said stephanie pope mythopoetry.com


notes
1.  "Even now I can do no more than tell stories--"mythologize." Carl Jung p. 299, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  For Jung's mythopoetic image  regarding the interplay between the "here" and the "here after" see Chapter XI, "On Life After Death" pp.299-302.  It is on p. 300 he suggests we lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come.  Soul-making carries itself in the belly of the story going on between the "here" and the "here after"  like the biblical whale carried Jonah.

2.  For the labors of  heroic man see the 12 labors of Hercules
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/labors.html

3.  
 “Dema”  have been imagined as the Earth Mother, guardian spirits, ancestors, ancestral soul and that in part which helps formulate the image of the high-god (aka the limits of the human situation)  in monotheistic imagination. For the latter see The Master of Animals: A Study in the Symbolism of Ultimacy in Primitive Religion, Ralph L. Slotten  Oxford University Press, Journal of Bible and Religion Vol. 33, No. 4 (Oct., 1965), pp. 293-302