The Burden of Blood.
By Jacqueline Brooke
Because I hold the ancestral burden too.
The bundle I carry has been torturing
the woman in my family across the ocean of time,
up and down through the ages.
The guilt, the shame, the doubt, the unworthiness,
the helplessness, the shame, the guilt, the doubt
Hide me away for what I am.
Woman.
And I feel it in my heart of hearts
stained red inside my guts.
The load I carry that has unknowingly
been cascading down my family line
of beautiful, high priestess, powerful, delicate flowers.
For we were all flowers once wild,
now seethed and captured,
made to pay for our god given,
divinely gifted beauty.
Made to hide as we bleed unto this world.
And I sit and cry and I bleed because “I can’t!”.
As this phrase haunts
and terrorizes my entire being
rigged in my cries as I pray up and down,
left to right to anyone willing to care.
I bleed out the pain of my mother
and her mother’s mother alike,
for women bleed the blood of this human world.
We bleed out the pain, the suffering, the wounds,
the wars, the destruction, the rape, the abuse,
the heart break, the soul lost, ever lost.
Charge of the soul encapsulated in duality.
Shedding and letting go,
scrambling to pick up the crumbs
of our falling civilization to find healing.
To find meaning.
And I will always bleed unto this world.
As I swear up and down to the great mother,
for my blood is sacred.
My daughters and her daughter’s daughters
will bleed a blood unto this earth of a different shade.
For they will no longer carry the burden
of a shame rigged into the hearts and souls
of the wild and tangled
And I’ll die the death of thousands
before my daughter and her daughter’s alike
have to carry this load.
They’ll bleed a blood to transform
this disease the women in my family
have been tortured with for far too long.
A blood to feed the mother,
a blood to heal the others,
and a blood to feel another.
The sacred space, the blood space.
The blood of light, the blood of dark,
the blood of yes, the blood of no,
the blood of lost, the blood of found.
The destiny of our red stained guts
whispers softly, caressing in our hair
that it is time, it is time,
it is time.
Let the wild feminine rise.
Unleash her beauty, rugged in her course,
secret me away no more.
Let thy not be mistaken.
You are worthy.
*****
A free spirit to her core, Jacqueline is a woman of many worlds. She often finds herself intoxicated by the illusive and miraculous nature of existence. A recent graduate of Kripalu School of Yoga, she is a certified 200-hr RYT. While in India for 4 ½ months, she conducted field work research on the healing capacities of Yoga, along with losing herself only to find herself then lose herself, over and over again. She is currently attending art school in NYC, and uses self expression as one of the many tools to understanding herself. An airy dreamer, she enjoys expressing herself through dance, poetry, journaling, quoting the greats, exaggerated hand motions, weird faces, and visual art. Navigating the ups and downs of life, Jacqueline is always in the practice of dancing with her shadow. She shares a deep affinity with four-legged creatures and protests their mass suffering with veganism. When she’s procrastinating, you can often find her prancing and dancing about in the space her body is occupying or nerding out over metaphysics, ontology, goddess archetypes, black holes, the nature of time, quantum physics, and altered states of consciousness. Jai Ma!