Caterina’s Reviews > Voices of Light: Spiritual and Visionary Poems by Women from Around the World from Ancient Sumeria to Now > Status Update

Blue is Greece where fishermen tame their boats,
where I float naked in the color of truth, the sea

humming in my ears, lulling me with ultramarines
like a baby kicking in amniotic seas, like god

whose throne is this transparent blue bowl
this star-sapphire studded cradle of waves

She must have blue skin and eyes, lapis lazuli
looped in strands and strands around her rounded belly


—from Blue, Aliki Barnstone

Her hair is the white froth of rice rising up kettlesides, her mind also.
....
We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness.
But at times..we experience something close.
As our life resembles life, and this garden the garden.
And in the silence surrounding what happened to us

it is the bell to awaken God that we’ve heard ringing.

—Carolyn Forché, from “The Garden Shukkei-en”

The yew tree points up. It has a gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness—
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
.
.
—Sylvia Plath, from The Moon and the Yew Tree, 22 October 1961

My sister,
you come like a spring wind over our valleys . . .
Violets in shadow have the scent of fulfillment.
I want to take you to the loveliest place in the forest:
There we’ll confess to each other how we saw God.
.
.
.
Vernal Mystery, Edith Södergran, (1892-1923), Finnish, wrote in Swedish. (Translated by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone.)

Is it the night of power
Or only your hair?
Is it dawn
Or your face?

In the songbook of beauty
Is it a deathless first line
Or only a fragment
Copied from your inky eyebrow?
.
Is it musk of a Chinese deer
Or scent of delicate rosewater?
The rose breathing in the wind
Or your perfume?
.
Everyone faces a mosque of adobe & mud
When they pray
The mosque of Hayati’s soul
Turns to your face
.
Bibi Hayati d.1853 Persian

For the Courtesan Ch'ing Lin

On your slender body
Your jade and coral girdle ornaments chime
Like those of a celestial companion
Come from the Green Jade City of Heaven.
One smile from you when we meet,
And I become speechless and forget every word...
I can visualize you all alone,
A girl harboring her cryptic thoughts.
.
.
--Wu Zao (Wu Tsao)
translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung

To Hope

A green beguilement in our natural life,
mad hope and frenzy wrapped about with gold,
a dream by those awake, yet thinly cold
like dreams and treasures rife, with illusions.
Soul of the world, exuberant old age,
decrepit greenness of pure fantasy,
the now for which the happy ones rampage,
the future where the miserable would be.
.
.
continued in comment

The soul, like the moon,
is new, and always new again.

And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.

Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla,
am new, each moment new.

My teacher told me one thing,
Live in the soul.

When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.
.
.
.
—Lal Ded, 14th century (?), Kashmir
translated by Coleman Barks

You are the luminous earth
through whom the Word breathed forth...
.
.
.
from Antiphon of the Gem Who Is Mary by Hildegard of Bingen

I’ll never forget the sunset at Brook Pavilion—
drunk with beauty, we lost our way.
When the ecstasy faded, we turned our boat home,
but it was late and we strayed into a place deep with lotus flowers
and rowed hard, so hard
the whole shore erupted with herons and gulls.
.
.
.
—To the Tune of “Dream Song,” Li Qingzhao (Li Ch’ing-Chao) (1084-ca. 1151)