To The Goddess

Goddess, I come to you
my neck wreathed with rosebuds,
my head filled with visions of infants,
my palms open to your silver nails,
my eyes open to your rays of illumination,
my vagina & my womb gaping
to be filled by your radiance...
O goddess, I would be a worth vessel.
Impermanence -- all is impermanence.
The cock rises to fall again:
the woman fills only to empty
in a convulsion that shakes the world:
the poet grows to become a voice
only to lose that voice when death takes her.
A stroke cancels her upon the page --
& yet I open her book & a chill wind blows from eternity.
Goddess, I come to you
wreathed in tears, in losses, in whistling winds.
I wrap the witch's herbs around my neck
to ward off the impermanence that is our common fate.
The herbs dry & crumble,
as my face grows the map of my anxieties,
& my daughter leaps up like a vine
twining around the trellis of impermanence.
O goddess, teach me to praise loss,
death & the passing of all things -- for from this flux
I know your blessings flow.

1981 Text by Erica Jong; Illustrations by Harry N. Abrams
From the book "Witches" ISBN 0-8109-1765-3
All rights reserved.