Memory in a Meadow

MEAD MEADOW DANCE


Mead made from meadows that bloom in my mind
At the top of tall mountains, whispered with wings

Where honied winds blow with sunshine entwined
And snow weeps down laughing in hundreds of springs
Witches Broom,
River Birch,
Bitter Brush
Burdock

Brew it in deep vats, seal it in sapphire
It will bloom in the darkness growing profound
Bubbling with impulse and sure to inspire
It will open vast vistas when we pass it around
Mountain Mahogany,
Lupine and Larkspur,
Chokecherry,
Currents
Of red

More than just drink, this mist of the mountain
Brings dreams that dance and transcend
Passed hand to hand, all baptized in it’s fountain
Company, fellowship, friends
Sagebrush and Blue Bells
Yarrow and Juniper
Columbine
Aspen
And
Pine


©Edwina Peterson Cross

ARTIST

Artist

I did not believe in the painting
The dance, the words or the song
But I believed in the Painter
A belief that was solid and strong

I believed in the Dancer
Whose movement was fire to behold
I believed in the Singer
Whose song filled the darkness with gold

I believed in the Actor
Who could move souls with her voice
And I believed in the Woman
When she spoke of a different choice

The medium never has mattered
To one who draws light from above
Who makes radiant rainbows of magic
As a prism of passion and love

I believed in the Artist
With a faith strong as heaven can weave
This giving soul suntouched with genius
I believed.

I will always believe.


©Edwina Peterson Cross
(For April)

The Animus - Merlin

~ One of Jung's interpreters held that the anima/animus character was only understandable to those who have known true love. ~


I am no Jungerian scholar
I comprehend his thoughts in mist and metaphor
His concepts in analogy and image
I met him in the Dreamtime, walking

But I understand the anima/animus
Down to spit, pith and marrow
It is a weaving I like, a net for thought
I find attractive and entrancing, more so because
It holds water

~

I.
I projected what I wanted, I loved what I had
Projected because it was already
Mine

The times we said we were too close to be
Two people, too much to be apart,
We were simply
Right

And what I loved so much in you, was mine
All along
Animus/beloved the other side of who
I am

I will take your laughter,
Your quick mind,
Vivid dreams, creative spark,
Your utterly unique expression
And string them like pearls
On a wire of living light
I will add your gentle hands,
Ingenious ideas,
Soft words,
Sharp wit,
The love in your eyes and
I will tie a circle with your tears

Then I will compass my throat
With this circuit of pearl
And push them through ‘til they
Click on bone
Breathe bone, become bone
From this bone they were birthed
From this bone they became
Now they are
Recalled
Returned
Restored
To make
Me
Whole

Friend/lover
Brother/sister
Soul-mate

Mine


II.
Speak from my dreams, my mythic muse
The other side of the mask
Speak leather to lace, bone to breast
A shadow that’s harlequin cast

The dynamic strength of words
The powerfulness of action
Stretch sinew to my curving
Blend strength to my compassion

Mixed potency of power
Splice spirit to my sensitive soul
Sculpt something clear and round
Translated, vibrant, whole

Coming at last to understand
I needn’t fear the other part
It is no hostile generic specter
But half of my harmonic heart


III.
The dream picks the form - sign, symbol, persona
Surfing through mythos on a rainbow wave of vision

“How the anima/animus appears reflects either the condition
or needs of our soul presently” ~ That’s what the man said.
You gotta listen to what the man said. Besides

Jung said that the animus is more likely to be personified by multiple male figures, while the anima is frequently a single female. The anima/animus appears in Symbolism in Dreams and Narratives: a peer figure of the opposite sex to the ego-bearer to whom he/she has a strong and compelling tie or bond, mythological attachment, often a lover, brother/sister, soul-mate.

He dips the quill into the ink, which sloshes across his already stained fingers. I look over his shoulder. “Whatcha writing?”
He looks back at me with a small smirk. “Words. words. words.”
“Smart ass.”
He laughs through his nose and continues to scribble.
“I’ve got this incredible story . . .” he says. “Well no. It’s not that it’s an incredible story, it’s that the characters and starting to come alive here, which is MAKING it an incredible story.” He dips into the ink again. His eyes look bright and slightly fevered, his hands are moving so fast that the ink is splotching and splashing. “My hands won’t keep up with my head!” he exclaims. I know the feeling. I know the look in his eyes. I decide to leave him alone. I walk to the window to see that the world is swathed in a soft grey fog.

While my back is turned the Bard becomes a Wizard. It is always happening, doesn’t bother me in the least. I turn around to the smell of apple blossoms and find him examining his hands. “Ink. It never really comes off you know. Why does he have to be such a slob?”
“Ink. I don’t think it’s been invented, dear. I think you have to write on wax with a stylus, but I’m not sure.”
“Doesn’t help my cuticles.”
“Humm. Merlin?”
“Humm?”
“When does a story become a myth?”
“Oh, goodness, I think you are assuming some things here. What makes you so sure a myth starts out as a story?”
I raise an eyebrow. “But myths ARE stories. What else would they start as? I mean, even if they are true stories, they are still stories.”
“Even so, there are all sorts of places that a story has to go before it becomes a myth. You can’t discount legends, folklore, fables . . .”
“Right. That was my point. When does something cease to be a story and become something else?”

He is patting him self all over his robe with a distracted visage.
“What are you looking for?”
“Pipe and tobacco.”
I shake my head. “Don’t go turning into Gandalf while I’m talking to you. Merlin doesn’t smoke.”
“Right. Well. Look here above your desk. Frazer, Graves, Campbell, Estes. Briggs. Don’t you find that a rather unholy combination if you are trying to make up your mind about story and myth?”
“No, because I’m not going to make up my mind from what one person says.”
“Not even me?”
“Most definitely not even you! Though, I’ll add your opinion to The Powers-that-be.” I jerked my head at the books above the desk.
He laughs softly “You are not going to make up your mind at all. You just like kicking the idea around. Your stories are all mixed up with dreams and fantasies, reveries and illusions anyway. Bubbles. Speaking of which, where is Jung?”
“Laying open on the desk.”
“Figured he had to be around here somewhere.”

I pick up the book, but when I turn back he has changed again. I smile slowly. “Hi Pal.”
“What are we reading?”
“Jung.”
“Oi vey. Too much brain work. I vote for Yeats.”
I reach for another book and hold out my hand.

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth wood in the lake
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats
There we've hid our fairy vats
Full of berries
And of Reddest Stolen Cherries.

Come away oh human child
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy hand in hand
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand
(W.B. Yeats)

Edwina Peterson Cross
January 2005

Anglication

I have been known to rail and fume
Stand on soap boxes and wave my arms
Over my own blind Anglicized education
I studied everything from Bede and Beowulf to
‘Modern British Drama:’ Current, Mod, Contemp
And back again and back again and back again
From Romantic Restoration Victorian Middle Ages of
Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Olde English, Middle English, Modern English and
Everything in between

By the time I was seventeen I had been through the complete works of
cummings, Thomas, Keats, Yeats, Sandburg, Byron, Dickinson,
Tennyson, Browning, Shelly, Blake, Wilde, Whitman - more than once
Shakespeare and Millay were already ragged
These friends I knew as well as those I spoke to every day,
How did I never notice their Anglo-English names?
How did I never even wonder that they all spoke one language?
That if I had been able to look, their faces would all have been so
White?

How could I have studied so long and so deep
Without ever having read
The words of Li Bai?
With all the knowledge they gave me . . .
How could they have let me walk into the world without knowing
Federico García Lorca?

I had to find both Basho and Issa by myself
Rainer Maria Rilke and Jorge Luis Borges
Czeslaw Milosz and Jaime Sabines
Gabriela Mistral and Sarojini Naidu
and Jalaluddin Rumi, which made me weep

For the years that had gone by
Without him

And I will never forgive
This loss:
The absence in the ancient echos
Of the sweet voice
That learned love beside me
Touching me with Tennyson,
Caressing me with Shakespeare,
And neither of us having a clue
That somewhere in the world
There was

Neruda


©Edwina Peterson Cross

A New Dawn

The Amazon’s Ride


Descended from Strife and Symmetry
Warriors of ancient lore
To restore health and Harmony
The Amazon’s ride to War

The Martial Queen with her ivied shield
A strong memory of spiritual power
Leads her warriors into battle
At this essential echoed hour

She faces the foe with the weight of love
The blazing heart of a swan
From the strength of a circle of women
Comes the light of a glistening new dawn


©Edwina Peterson Cross
June 11, 2005

Alchemist Lair with a purplish flair
In the top of a turreted tower
Full of breeze and twining trees
A beautiful ivy wrapped bower

There she works in earnest joy
Writes possibilities, paints with chance
It is here in the circling wind
She and her Goddess dance

Some find their truth in Spartan cells
Bare walls for pure contemplation
Here circles must surge, wind must sing
In a sacred dance of creation

Alchemist

At the top of the stair
Is the Alchemists Lair
But you may find
Nothing there
The whisp of a whisper
The pray of a prayer
A split deck spinning solitaire
A venerable vintage, old and rare
Caught in crystal whirled in air
A candle’s breath, that bright hot flare
Then suddenly . . . . there is nothing there

The students come and they prepare
Declare, compare, become aware
Then return to earth back down the stair
Leaving a mystery they cannot forswear
Leaving a shadow in the empty chair
An Alchemist in the Alchemist’s Lair . . .
Weaving golden verse from the empty air . . .


©Edwina Peterson Cross

After Revelation


Knowing doesn’t change being
What is at this moment splashing in your eyes
Strung across your forehead like prayer flags
Slapping your face with the smack of the present
Shaking your shoulders with the snap of now
Is not in any way modified or altered
By any kind of sapience
Of what will
Inevitably be

That you will open your eyes one day
And find them gone
Doesn’t stop the morning from crashing
Like a rhinoceros through the porcelain dawn
A future vision of vanishing tail lights
Empty chairs at the kitchen table
Tidy, dusty, silent bedrooms
Does not erase fatigue
Nor transform the existent ache
For breathing space
A private moment
The time to think

How odd to be human
When knowing the future
Being all too aware of imminent
Events, equations, emotions
Doesn’t change an iota
Of the dance of
Now

I remember mornings
That peeled my eyelids open
Like the rip of surgical tape
When two small girls
Shook the stasis of the planet
And threw it off it’s axis
And I was embroiled,
Consumed, absorbed,
Immersed in the
Immediate

I opened my eyes one day
And found them gone


©Edwina Peterson Cross