The First Church of Whoopie

Goddess Ritual for an Unexpected Baby Crone

Goddess,
Dearest Mother,
here I stand:
Feet planted on earth,
Sheltering in the circle I have cast
To contain the energies I am about to unleash;

My left hand outstretched
to the fire-ringed bowl of the Western Ocean,
Whose waters feed so many millions of your children;
My right hand reaching eastward
across the body of Amerika,
This troubled land whose redemption
I still dare to pray for;

My belly, so recently invaded and emptied
by the surgeon's knife,
Turned scar-first towards
the barren cold of the Northern tundra;
My ever-lovin' ass still
shakin' it for your pleasure,
Caressed by the serpent's-fire breath
of the tropic South.

I cast my eyes upward
Through the ocean of air
in which all your children swim,
Towards the infinite star-shot Universe
that is your home;
I feel your Cozmik rays of love
pour down through my brain,
Down my spine,
through each of my chakras in turn,
Straight on down into Mother Earth,
All the way down
to the life-giving furnace-heart of Gaia,
Your daughter, our too-often neglected home;

And as I stand here, transfixed,
The earth-energies come welling back up through me,
Through the soles of my feet,
through my yoni,
Through the space where
the vibrations of my womb still sing,
Through my heart and brain,
Out my Third Eye
And back into the Universe
In one great reverberation
of Universal Life Energy;

And my mouth falls open,
takes in lungfuls of the breath of life,
and channels every fibre of my body and soul
all the energies of the cosmos
flowing through me
into one resounding cry:

Mama!
I heard your voice calling me.
From the depths of the anesthesia,
As the surgeon removed my womb,
I heard you singing,
Summoning me to this new state of being.

And so, now,
I stand before you.
Baby crone, new-minted,
Arriving at this time in my woman-life
a little sooner than I had expected,
But grateful to you
that I am still here
to answer your summons.
And now … 
Here I am.
Take me.
I'm all yours.

The Mother Earth Uterine Cancer Blues

(On August 7th, 2006, I underwent a full hysterectomy. This is one of several pieces--so far--inspired by that event.)

The fates have seen fit to inflict on my body
one of the emblematic stigmata
of my generation of women.
So many of my sisters have given up
wombs,
ovaries,
breasts
these quintessential life-creating woman-parts,
To the surgeon's knife,
Sacrifices on the altar of modern medicine
to ward off
that equally emblematic curse of our time,
cancer,
That disease which is
The inevitable consequence
of our species' refusal
to stop fouling our collective nest,
Slowly but surely pissing out
a growing sea
of toxic industrial excretions
that continues to rise
until it threatens to poison
all life on our great Mother Earth.

Medical, political, and religious pundits
wring their hands
over the miracle of stem cells,
The biological Philosopher's Stone,
Able to transform into any type of flesh.
But how much more miraculous are
our ovaries
wombs
breasts,
Our bodies' own hatcheries,
incubators,
and food supply
for the whole next generation of the species?
Why, then, do these same pundits
NOT
wring their hands
over this chemical war
on our generative organs?
For surely this war bodes ill
for the future of all our children.
Because those of us who have lost wombs,
ovaries,
breasts,
AND lives
Are unwitting canaries in Coal Mine Earth,
Warning of much greater ills to come
if Things Don't Change.

And when I say, "greater ills …", well …

Consider this:
Evolutionarily speaking,
Mother Nature wields
a sharp and heartless scalpel.
When a species, or a biosphere,
has outlived its ability to function,
It tends to disappear
in the cosmic-scale equivalent
of a heartbeat.
In other words, worst-case scenario,
We are talking full-on extinction
of the human race.

Now in human terms,
extinction could be a long, long time coming…
And the human race,
particularly its ruling class,
has demonstrated over and over again
its fiendish expertise at denial—
Especially when the first casualties
of an inconvenient problem
are people of lower priority and status,
easily kept out of sight and out of mind:
The old,
The young,
The queer,
Those too poor to afford adequate health care,
Those too poor to avoid living and working
with the very toxins that threaten us;
Those not born with Caucasian skin …
And still, even in this day and age,
women generally.

But if humanity fails to wake up
and heed the meaning
of this growing plague upon our wombs,
Our descendents will yet have just cause
to curse our generations
for giving cancer
to Mother Earth Herself,
Such that her generative powers
will no longer be able
to feed and house our species.

And what then will our descendents do,
when that Darwinian scalpel comes down
like Fate's guillotine,
To perform that Planetary Hysterectomy
on Mother Earth--
When that evolutionary blade
cuts our species off
from the only womb/home
we have ever known?