Forty Years Out

In honor of National Coming Out Day on October 11 and Gay Pride celebrated here in Asheville North Carolina last weekend, I offer this poem of mine, originally published in Sinister Wisdom.

Birth
From between my own lips I deliver
consciousness of who I am—
Daddy’s not in power anymore.
Coming out is virgin birth like Mary’s:
partheno partheno partheno
genesis!
Discovery of myself
emerges sudden as a baby’s head.
Acceptance within
emerges second, like the placenta.
Revelation to others
emerges, emerges, emerges.

Initiation
The Dyke crucified by family and culture
hangs on the tree hungry
for illumination.
Descending into the cave,
the deep heart underworld,
Inanna quests her vision,
seeks her own gifts.
Initiation
hauls wisdom in
over timeless days of decades,
and with its sacrifice,
changes
everything.
Coming out
inaugurates me
to the power
coming in.

Breaking Ground
The ground always there, nothing to notice,
the expected orientation, the way it is.
Everything groomed and neat,
a she with a he.
And in the rows between where
upstarts might disrupt:
a thick, black, sheet of plastic.|
It takes a Movement
to push us through.
We the fragile seedlings
break ground
crazy with the joy of germination.
Pulsing with impossible love,
we grant the garden precious chaos.

Eruption
From the core, comes eruption.
Its catalyst: desire named.
Fire flows upward
from the root through the crown.
Kundalini, as it rises,
kills every lie;
cascades back down in cleansing flame.
What remains: volcanic ash,
the nitrogen of miracles.
This quantum leap
cannot be predicted.
As Ruth follows Naomi,
I attend the body’s wisdom,
following only her
furnace of burning truth.
Each time I climax
in the electric garden,
Pele,  Kali, and Bride
show me:
There are no others,
only One.

Passage
Coming out is crossing,
not knowing how,
the line, the road, the tracks;
the river, the channel, the canyon.
crossing that chasm by sheer grace.
A pilgrimage I learn I am on
only when labor is done
and I gain my name.
Crossing the culture
causes me wounds
but the view from the other side,
oh, an expanse of compassion!
Disclosure
envelops the suffering of others.
I am a woman wearing a burqa,
the shroud that allows only
a patch of mesh to see and breathe.
I am a woman who rips it off.
I will never take for granted
peripheral vision,
or sunlight’s revelation.
Coming out I become
fully human.

Transformation
When a caterpillar
calls itself a butterfly,
fresh perception from its airy outlook
shrinks the milkweed cradle.
When the daily body
becomes the sacred body,
the lesson of evanescence
requires new bearings.
Culture shock!
But the North Star appears in my heart.
Freedom’s song calls
all the lost girls
to name their splendor.

Blossoming
We nudge one another to ask,
‘Does she go to our church?’
When I admit myself
to full membership in the garden,
the strength of confirmation
comes upon me.
An outward sign, a sacrament
I am awakened, illumined, enlightened.
What is revealed to me,
I must reveal:
petals in a whorl
that spiral inwards without end.
A midnight moon
filled with Kuan Yin’s
boundless benevolence.
Celebration
of self as She,
flower in full glory, and
smiling gardener.
With this blossoming
I do
commence.

Homecoming
After being forbidden the image,
to see in the mirror!
No reunion is deeper.
After the prison of division,
I marry my true self.
I return to the kernel,
to the way I was made
by the Great Creator.
I restore my original language,
I mend
the rent fabric of my body.
Whole with every healing story
of every holy book,
I am, in coming out,
an exile coming home.

Rebirth
The nightmare’s bridle:
loosed!
Out
of what is dark and female
comes
all that is. Bold
is the resurrection of Persephone
from her winter cave.
To greet her,
the whole world
greens.
At forty years out,
this step in the dance
dips me clean
in Mother’s waters;
baptizes me back,
all the way back,
to original joy.

©Susa Silvermarie 2015