FALL 2007
The Mother of Us All
God was female for at least the first 200,000 years of human life on earth.
~ Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo*
For 200,000 years we called you Mother,
honored the blood-red kisses you planted
upon our upturned brows.
How did we come to forget our original womb,
the lap from which we sprang, hearts open,
mouths searching for the nipple?
Hungry now, we cry out, lost between liminal memory
and sacred thought, aching to return home.
You are the primal seed, the gestation that bears
all hope, sustains through drought and famine,
disease and dire sorrow.
We spoke our first words to your wide eyes.
Abundantly our future reflected back into
our open, expectant faces.
Your sturdy hands cradled our fragile bones,
mended our tender muscles, ushered us into the bright,
round world of sky and earth, water and wood.
In your breath, myth and memory merged,
science was born, art echoed its wisdom
on the cool walls of dank caves, language danced
on the tongue-tips of cooing babies.
You suckled our dreams as we tended community fires,
fed us stories to satiate the bellies of our minds,
satisfy our growling need to fathom the unknowable.
Sky lords severed our jubilant tongues, uncoiled your spiral,
fabricated straight lines where once circles spun.
Subjugation overthrew cooperation. Where once peace
rivered through our veins, blood froze,
fearful of the silencing sword’s metallic, bitter edge.
The icy marrow of amnesia impeded our way,
though the moon and the stars, the sun and the winds
whispered your name, coaxing us to shake off
our long, fitful slumber.
Though our twenty-first century minds may fail us,
our cells remember: all life swells within the folds
of your milky skirt, spinning and leaping out of darkness
into light, then back again into the primal, original sigh.
All death awaits your embrace, the final kiss of comfort
releasing us into the crook of your welcoming elbow,
nestling us into the soft curve of your breast — home once more,
the terrible exile undone at long, long last.
* Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of Earth (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 49.