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You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

Fear cannot touch me…
It can only taunt me,
It cannot take me,
Just tell me where to go…
I can either follow,
Or stay in my bed…
I can hold on
To the things that I know…
The dead stay dead,
They cannot walk.
The shadows are darkness.
And darkness cannot talk

from A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice

Are you, are you coming to the tree?
Wear a necklace of rope side by side with me.
Strange things have happened here,
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight in the hanging tree.

from “The Hanging Tree” by Suzanne Collins

Hush, beating heart of Christabel!
Jesu, Maria, shield her well!
She folded her arms beneath her cloak,
And stole to the other side of the oak.
      What sees she there?

There she sees a damsel bright,
Drest in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck, and arms were bare;
Her blue-veined feet unsandl’d were,
And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair.
I guess, ‘twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she—
Beautiful exceedingly!

Mary mother, save me now!
(Said Christabel) And who art thou?

from “Christabel” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover’s pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.

from “Song of the Chattahoochee”

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Requirements for Admittance to the Sisterhood of Women: A Revision

Real women, they say.
Real women.
There are rules and regulations,
standards,
expectations.
Real women are ____.
Real women have ____.
Real women eat ____.
Real women buy ____.

Well. This is embarrassing.
Truly.
But you see, the Sisterhood–
the one all women belong to–
we met, just last week
to discuss exactly this:
the dire question of who gets to be a Real Woman.

You never showed up,
too busy, no doubt, with your own conversations
on who should be kept out.
But, well…this is awkward.

See, we all took a vote.
The whole Sisterhood, yes.
Should there be an exam? A medical test?
No.

We decided to let anyone in
who says that a woman’s soul lives
in their skin.
Regardless of whether or not someone else
agrees with their assessment of themselves.

And this notion that gender requires peer-review…
well, we’ve decided it simply won’t do.
So the only one out of the Sisterhood–well–
it’s you.

The first thing you always feel
Is betrayed.
How could you? You cry.
How could you leave me
After all I did to be what you wanted?
How can you look at the twisted shape
Of the malformed creature
I made myself into
And say you don’t love this
Monster of your own creation?

How can you spend months, years
Stitching me together piece by piece,
A living doll made of all the best parts
Of all the more perfect women
You could never get?
How can you bring life to something
So hideous
No one else could love it
And then refuse to love it yourself?
You made me! You,
The Victor Frankenstein of lovers,
Putting in long nights of gruesome work,
Only to walk away when the work is finished,
And I am not what you envisioned.
How dare you.

I was golden once.
I had a soul.
I was whole, imperfect,
Beautifully so. I was new in the world.
I trusted. I loved.
I loved…unwisely.
I fell for the false grandeur of your vision,
Laid out for me like the only path–
The only way a mere mortal
Can hope to be loved by a someday god.
I did not know you were
The god of Death.
And no one ever told me that love
Is not surgery.