The Nightingale

Image: The Call of the Nightingale © Jo Jayson 2013 www.jojayson.com

The nightingale presses her

soft feathered breast

into the spike of the thorn,

penetrating her own aching heart

as her song dies

at sunset.

Or does she?

What if, instead,

The nightingale melods her

melancholy into the world’s

most lovely verse,

so strong and convincing

in the depth of its sincerity

that the rose sheds its thorns

into the previous season’s

leaf litter and raises its

most fragrant blossomed branch

skyward, as a throne

for her to perch upon

as she sings her heart outward

at sunset?

Self-inflicted wounds

are an option,

so too is the courage to

feed pain as a holy sacrament

to truth and beauty.

Only the latter speaks to love.

I know birds well enough

to believe the nightingale’s

song emerged from swallowing

whole the ancient sorrows

of the wounded feminine,

gestating them around the

turns of the great spiral,

and gifting them back to the

world in new-born form.

This is not lost power,

but forgotten power.

Well, not completely forgotten.

Within you there is a nightingale

and there is a rose bush,

you’ve been referring to them

as all the things that you long

to manifest,

but have been afraid to deserve

because a woman

you respected once showed

you how to lean into thorns

and you believed that’s how

it had to be,

always.

This poem is here to say:

“That’s not true.”

These words are a song that

came to me on the rose-scented

breeze,

one evening,

at sunset,

carried in a voice that my blood knew

as kin.

It was the sound produced across the

lactating vocal chords

of Remembering Woman,

re-membering.

Re-membering to me her primal ties

to the innate courage

to embody Life.

For so many generations we have

been dying away

at our own hands.

It’s time to step clear of

the thorns,

isn’t it?

You’ve been sensing this too,

I know.

When Remembering Woman asked

me what she could do to help,

I asked for my own song,

a song likened

to the nightingale’s most lovely

sunset song.

I was absolutely sure this would do it.

She said to me,

“You’ve been singing it

all along, Dear Girl.”

“Oh?” I replied.

“Yes,” she went on.

“But now you must believe in

what you sing.

That’s the difference between

being a girl and being a woman.

The girl knows the words.

The woman knows within her

what they mean.”

And, so, at sunrise,

that’s the choice I made,

to admit that I know what my

own song means.

The rose bush blushed when

it heard me say it out loud.

I figure that’s a very good

place to start.

© 2012-2020/Jamie K. Reaser

Published in "Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life" and 
"Wild Life: New and Selected Poems" 

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An Answer

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

At the end of every day

there is a silence that creeps

in.

It’s the unoccupied space

filled with memories

and what ifs.

Sometimes it has a name.

Usually not.

It keeps me in good company,

dependable

and never argumentative.

We’ve started growing old

together,

like long familiars do.

But lately my gratitude for

such a simple departure

into the night has begun

to wane.

I hear voices after the sun

sets.

One of them sounds like mine.

I dare myself to believe

in the other,

with little success

as of yet.

What does one do with

an interlude

in which a single candle

burns

faster than the red wine?

Perhaps this is a space

reserved for prayers.

If so, I am lacking,

for I have forgotten

for that which I used to pray

so heartedly.

“Maybe,” says the flickering

flame,

“you are not to pray,

but to become the answer

to a prayer.”

© 2012-2013/Jamie K. Reaser

Published in "Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life." (www.hiraethpress.com)

The Roots

Image: origin unknown

There’s a little boy that I’ve been

watching,

all dressed in white linen,

on his knees,

digging,

desperately seeking The Roots.

He’s finally found them,

fingers raw and blooded by

perseverance,

but there they are -

long residing at the base of

Rumi’s lamenting reed.

Cut off from our ancient lineage

we cannot but cry out

for a vision of Home –

Though the meaning of the

deep inner wailing may

elude us for many generations,

And the masks we take up

make us unrecognizable even

in our own mirrors,

We cannot deny the sound

emanating from our own

severed soul.

It’s the one that constantly

tells us that we don’t belong here,

that we have been forsaken,

and that we have forsook.

Rumi’s reed longed for a heart

so that it could explain

the pain of its yearning

to return to its roots.

This I have.

And so let me tell you how

I have ached:

Like the fledgling thrown

from the nest,

thinking its tending parents

now want it destroyed

on the hard ground below.

Like the Autumn leaves

torn away by winds before

they had conversed

long enough to learn the

names of all the other leaves

on all the other branches.

Like the rock rolled down

the mountain slope

in the wash of heavy winter rains,

never again to know the

boulder in which it was

brought forth from the belly well

of the inner Earth.

This is the power of Love,

I am told:

To dare to risk your offspring

so that they may learn to fly.

To make offerings of yourself

to the Holy that nourishes

you from above and below.

To surrender to the pull of gravity

as a humble act of coming

onto the knees of all Creation.

To dig until the melancholy fingers yield

the droplets of bloodlines

that have departed across entire

Oceans of destiny.

I am the last.

The last child has been taken

from me by the jealous hunters,

and so it stops with me.

I am the last.

I am the last to be the cut reed

and the reed cutter,

The oppressed

and the oppressor.

I am the last to forsake

the Truth

and be forsaken by

the story my lineage

construed to keep us

women safe.

Now is the time that

we must return to our

power,

That we must reclaim

the connection to our Earth-deep

roots and grow forth

again with a ripeness

that when savored

seeks only to unite.

But how?

Acknowledgment.

Acknowledging the suffering

of every reed cut

and of every reed cutter

who has been chased by

the fear of his own death.

Honoring.

Honoring the fleshy sacrifice of the reed

and the soul loss of the

reed cutter,

and the gift of shelter that they

somehow managed to

co-creatively manifest.

Learning.

Learning to hear the reed’s

cry in my own voice,

and yours,

and too in the voice of the

reed cutters within.

Learning that the sound

most needed now is one

of joy.

Re-membering.

Re-membering how to find

the way back to the Earth

through dark passageways,

carrying with me every

incense-infused gift

that my ancestors have passed down

in the wrappings of the prayers that

someday,

this day,

I would take up

the alchemical bundle

called Love

and return with it to my roots.

And so I anoint that little boy

and his Mother

with the purest essence of belonging,

praying that they will no longer

feel disconnected, lonely, and unloved.

And down the matrilineal line

this too I receive.

The hungry ghosts will find that there

is nothing left here on which

to feed;

I can again draw nourishment

from who I am.

I am the black bird with a heart

who remembers the holy song

of the forgiving flute

made out of sacred reed.

©2012-2019/Jamie K. Reaser

From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World" 
Published by Talking Waters Press

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