This is my body said Demeter, briefly.
She wasn't given to words.
Her tapering toes said it curling along roots nuzzling moles and voles tapping the phosphates of the Eumenides (who were not word women either – liturgical dance, perhaps under their brown ceiling).
This is my body said Demeter's fingers, threading sunstruck cornstalks, tips extended, feathered nerve endings reduplicated, pliant.
And this, combing out her hair thinnings: keys to new sycamores, conkers, elderberries.
I am laying down layers of coal.
Mother, prattled Persephone, why do things keep falling?
Why won't the corn stay green?
And Mother, listen, feel – something underground is stamping, heaving, chanting.
Corn is mown and corn is ground.
Ground is torn and earth turns round.
This is my body baked as bread, Demeter said.
This is my body said the man, briefly.
He had been given to words.
Words were given to him.
He had given away his words.
Now, running out of stock and out of time and almost out of flesh (they were yapping, snapping, seething under the reaped furrows after his blood, the Furies) – this is my blood he added hastily, willing it all to friends.
Rabbi, babbled Thomas, how can we know the way?
Shall we all go under?
Earth is food and earth is wine.
Motherhood and fall are mine.
This is my body, wine and bread, the man about to be buried said.
Flying If it were not for birds how could we have concocted that dream of air?
So effortless! – as though from tree to ridge tile were a step any one of us might take today or at least tomorrow.
If it were not for hawks and upside down blue tits and of course butterflies and admittedly the wasps we wouldn't be Icarus with all those nightmares, daydreams, gliders and star wars.
How do they, why do they make it look so easy?
Did angels – I mean those strong rebellious ones – equip these fliers to contradict the earth, set up a counter creation?
If it were not for wings we shouldn't resent our feet.
If it were not for flight maybe we wouldn't – knowing how in the end we have to lie down flat – project our fantasies of afterlife as heavenly acrobatics.
Anne Ashworth We reprint the poem Flying as in Sofia 86 its final line got clipped in electronic flight. Acknowledgment:Flying first appeared inThe Rialto. AnneAshworth’s publications include her poem-sequenceTheVerbTo Be is Everywhere Irregular,(SoF),and her prose-and-poetry treatise,The Oblique Light:poetry and peak experience (Quaker Universalist Group). PoetAnneAshworth will be running a workshop at SoF summer conference InThe Making:Creativity in Religion And theArts (July 25-7:see insert flier). ‘There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, full of sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.’
We reprint the poem Flying as in Sofia 86 its final line got clipped in electronic flight.