These mandalas, stitched in 2024, I post as Hurricane Milton increases its roar where I live in Florida. Thankfully, I could post the below before loss of power.
My only question is, "Why Milton?" And so I rename this powerful storm, "Sophia."
SHE knows what she is doing.
STRAWBERRIES, BEES, AND LITTLE BOAS
12" diameter
cotton threads on linen
EVE AND THE ACCEPTABLE FRUIT
AND UNION OF THE OPPOSITES
This poem written in La Calmette as a "global warming" storm impacted my hamlet in the French Pyrenees.
FROM GOSPEL OF THE CELLS
July 14, 2002
HerRage repressed
Could hold no more.
Detonating heavens roared.
She flashed,
Crashing waves from above;
Madness pounding
The square of La Calmette.
Sheets of tears released,
Funneling
gullies;
Anguish
Drenching
The Earth’s floor.
“No more!” She wept,
“No more
War.”
Shakedowns from branches
Stoned the forest path.
Winds screamed,
“Dead plums in the night!”
Breakdowns of stalks
Swept to swollen rivers.
Downpour roared,
“Corn rotted to the roots!”
All this—
The torrent of HerWrath,
Her truth.
I heard the peasant say it in a
dream,
C’est le déluge du Nature,
Notre Terre, Notre
Mère.
And in those corner rooms
Behind locked shutters,
Children huddled lost
From a lost summer.
Flickering lights from their T.V.
Speckled shadows on their faces
While night storms raged—
The bolts of Her electric madness
Swallowed shadows on the square
And children in the arms
Of their bewildered mothers
Sniffled, Maman, pourquoi?
We are silent.
The farmers, the students, the teachers;
The mothers; the fathers,
The leaders, the followers;
The ignorant, the wise.
Gnostics, agnostics,
The faithful, the knowing;
The poet, the madman, the thief.
We are stunned, we are silent;
Such is the pressure
Of our unacknowledged grief.
But yes, we know why.
Somewhere in the linings
Of our storm clouds
We know Her—
The greatEarth,
The reception of our deaths and
births,
The chalice of our ashes and our
bones,
The breast from which food flows;
The quencher of our thirst
The glory for our eyes
The music to our ears
The reverence to our nature;
Our fear,
The fear.
Oh Mother!
We shudder
In Her first light to the last
(The dawn of our resurrection
The dusk of our end)
So that we may begin again—
If only through her benevolence—
The only Mother of us all
The one Mother of us all
In whom we are born to trust.
The One we have betrayed.
And now Her torrential rage,
Held in HerBelly
Since her molecules were split
And before
And before
And before
Since we crucified her Myth,
Now is HerStorm
And our alarm.
How long has she waited for our
Confession, our amends?
Where is our shame?
Shall we repent?
Or be drowned in her unceasing
rains?
The poet kneels before her Mass
A piece of dust, an ash
While roots are washed
Away from home
As HerGroans
Rumble
Like a fever
breaking
Into the lost summer of our Age
Rumbling
On and on and on
Her holy
holy
rage.
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