International Women’s Day – celebrating the eternal dance

I was honoured to read my poem today at the South Coast Writer’s Centre International Women’s Day celebration (as I have for the past two years) and even more humbled to be selected as this year’s winner of the competition. Wow!!

The theme for this year was #balanceforbetter and I wanted to explore the fragile balance of light and dark, yin and yang, feminine and masculine which can easily get out of equilibrium in our modern world through gender inequality, comparisons and judgement, and our disconnection from the earth and the source of life within all of us.

I’ve dedicated this poem to all my Sisters who are doing it tough, who are fighting for their lives, fighting for their dignity, or still trying to find the courage to step into the light.

May the eternal dance find its natural and authentic rhythm once more.

The Dance    

The earth trembles
He cracks you open
She plants you in her fertile crust
The stars fall from the night sky
Beaming from his eyes, illuminating her soul
She sighs a gentle kiss on your face
His whip thrashes against your panes
She envelopes you in the ghostly silence of a thousand ship wrecks
He roars a crescendo of clashing cymbals

Did heaven fall onto earth or the earth rise to the heavens
Did they meet on the thin veil of dreams and far horizons
Did they entwine like lovers lost in their yearning for delight
On the rise and fall of breath
The ebb and flow of tide
At dusk and at dawn
Between the shadow of death and the promise of new life

Day burns with his fervent fire
Night bleeds with her blades of ice
Fate lets you sip from his chalice of tears
Destiny cradles you in the arms of her newborn song
Fear drills his piercing nails into your skull
Hope lulls you to sleep on her feathered wings
Time torments you with his relentless race
Serenity lets you lay in her fields with nowhere to go, nowhere to be
Rage rises crimson inside his veins, against your foe
Joy melts your resistance in the light of her flickering candle

Did he come to you broad and brazen
Did she come to you vulnerable and quiet
He to protect
Her to nurture
The sacred and the divine
In a delicious rhyme
Of light and dark
Day and night
Power and pause
Separate and distinct
Yet one
In the eternal dance