She is rising.

She is rising…can you feel it? She is the crone that is climbing out of the mountain, the moss coating her ancient bones as she claws at the cobwebs around her eyes, drawing blood and letting it rain in her rage on the valley. She is the hag swelling out of the sea… hair green and slick, mouth open wide, screaming the siren scream that has all that hear her falling to their knees.as they press their heads against the rocks  with arms over their heads trembling in her rage. She is the harpy slashing the sky with her talons; her wings of silver and fire… a tempest that inhales all she sees and hurls it out of her, shattering it into a thousand pieces on the ground below. She is Kali swirling in a cyclone of fire that reaches her fingers out and burns all that she touches to ashes and twisted half memories of empires that should have fallen long ago.

She is here. She is pulling her children close to her, touching their fevered brows and stroking their distorted limbs that have become twisted and bent from thousands of years of anger and rage. She is holding them tight as they flail and fight scared and confused, not understanding why she will not let go…their brains addled and delirious from sickness and decay. She is wrapping their eyes with cloths steeped in yarrow and lavender, holding the healing balm so close that they lose their sight…for their sight was no longer real, it had been clouded by bricks and metal monoliths and monuments  built to honor power and fear.  Monuments built to gods that sit upon thrones of bones and ashes, while rivers of stagnant blood flow under their feet. She is soothing the swollen bellies of her sick children bloated from greed and avarice, feeding them honied drinks made by  the brothers and sisters who hid in the shadows for so long; the quiet tending the land, singing with the bees, and stroking the animals when the rest of their siblings were being infected with forgetting.

She never left, do you honor that? She brings the green hope that moves across the world, finding places to deposit its love in the middle of even the darkest corners of fearful hiding. She pulls calves slick with blood out of wombs of life and licks the babies clean with her long tongue. She breathes the zephyrs of the north over the steppes and the plains and kisses the ones standing guard over her marshes and fields with thanks and gratitude. She holds the moon to her breasts and shines its light upon the silvery tides that hold her children made of foam and lapis. She laughs and shakes the sky with  her wings of grace and hope as she touches the feathers that float from the heavens and wake up her slumbering masses.

She is destroyer, mother, maiden….and she is all of us and she will not be forgotten.