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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