These female runagates...

Wild Women.
Those who go in for “women’s rights” and general topsyturvyism. Some smoke cigars in the streets, some wear knickerbockers, some stump the country as “screaming orators,” all try to be as much like men as possible.	1
“Let anyone commend to these female runagates quietness, duty, home-staying, and the whole cohort of wild women is like an angry beehive, which a rough hand has disturbed.” —Nineteenth Century, March, 1892, p. 463.

E. Cobham Brewer 1810–1897. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898.

My question is this: why does it seem like such a either-or choice? If I am a cigar-smoking, knickerbocker-wearing Wild Woman, does that mean I cannot also want to nurture a home, cook on the hearth and love my family?

Today I am frustrated with this choice. I am all of these - the woman in the street, the angry beehive and the nourishing mother. For me, integrity is paramount in life. How do I go about integrating all these aspects of the woman I am, when even my own 'brain' tut-tuts at my desire to remain true to all aspects of my being?

This morning, I sat in a hospital room and was spoken at by a sharp-dressed man who prescribed me a drug to over-stimulate my ovaries, because for some reason, they are no longer working. When I tried to tell him about some of the difficulties I have had these last years, and the problems following my last failed pregnancy, he didn't look up. He continued to write his prescription and told me I could not blame the doctor for not noticing I was carrying around the debris of this pregnancy for 3 months - an oversight which led to infection and scarring. I wanted to shout at him that I bloody well did blame the doctor and why the hell was no one listening to me describe my own body. Instead, I burst into tears.

I burst into tears because deep down, I very much want to have a child, yet when I lost the last one, something inside me whispered "silly woman, to think you could have that life". It whispered it because part of my mind actually believes the bullshit, that I have to be a 'different kind of woman' to be a mother - not a wild woman, not a poet, not a free-wheeling dreamer. That to be a 'mother' means to be a 'good woman' who is quiet and dutiful and stays at home. That if I want to be A Mother, I have to give up being a poet.

Plath tried it. Sexton tried it.

How many more?

I am Wild Woman. I am Blissfool. I am a Lover. I don't want their drugs. I just want to embrace who I am and hope one day that I can also say "I am Mother".

Meanwhile, I have to go change into my knickerbockers . I am off to cheer on my good friend and fellow screaming orator, Gill Hands, as she performs poetry as part of the Apples & Snakes UK Exposed Tour. Now, wear did I leave that cigar?

Only in silence the word...(Ursula LeGuin)

Day 43

A single, white feather
drifts in heat-ribbons
to the frozen ground,

lands amongst the blades
tipped with silver,

trembles;

waits for wings to fly.


(from my Book of Days, a work in life-progress)

Love is not consolation. It is light. (Nietzsche)

End

These are the messages we leave:
paper feathers to the wind
that say in abbreviated code
all the things we cannot say.

I am having to learn our language,
these words of desire we press
upon finger and thumb, scan
with curious intimacy in public spaces
and return.

This is our touch, the body's union;
our sacred dance.

(taken from Byron Makes His Bed, my latest collection, released October 2006, available from Wild Women Press)

"A single word opens up infinite horizons to my soul" (St Therese of Lisieux)

"Total unity goes beyond the sense and the intellect, and the greatest of poets is rendered silent by the inability to share the inexpressible."
(E.G. Melillo)

I have just returned home from my trip with Angela to Assisi. The city itself is more beautiful than ever imagined, wrapped in rose-blushed sunlight, glittering. The experience was deeper and greater than I could have planned or hoped for. I have so much inside that I am trying now to understand. It feels too soon to try and find the words to express the heart-journey taken. This morning I sat in bed and watched the rain fall in white-light sheets, turning the world a vibrational green, and I re-read though my journals of the last week. I feel like I have been gone a month!

During my stay, I had the privilege to meet with Murray Bodo, OFM - the poet and Franciscan priest who wrote the Foreword for my last book Fragments. We sat on the roof terrace as the sun sank down into the valley, and we talked of the Poet's Path. It was good to talk this way, without feeling the need to explain the sense of mystery, and it got me thinking about my own journey, in the past, the present moment, the future.

All I can do is make the single human effort to live my life with honesty, without artifice or fear, without shrouding myself in veils. Perhaps each moment of each day is the same journey. Within the simplicity of the poem, we are revealed the simplicity of Being, and in the end, I am starting out where I have always been (or always Being?) - trying to make the word capture, hold the spirit in the still moment.

But in that very action, I meet the paradox of poetry. Can the poem truly satisfy, or is it only ever a sneak transient peek at the essence? For the poet, the poetry is never complete, because each poem is a pathway; in the moment the sensation occurs of capturing the 'truth of Being', that 'truth, by its very nature, dies away and is reborn into another movement, another question, another step, another poem. And every sound uttered is only trying to find its way back to its root of silence.