Requiem

The sun rose low over the horizon, and I stood on the shore of the Western sea and died a little. Each day for a thousand years or more, I’d watched a little piece of myself cleave off and shatter. Each day, I thought to myself: This is what happens when your children no longer remember you.

The Romans and Greeks of long ago knew me and my consort. Diana and Artemis, they called me, and a hundred more names. My lover they knew as Apollo and Thor and many more names. For a time, they watched the buck run from their spears across the dewy ground, and they saw me there. They watched the stars dance in the sky and saw pictures of me.

Their neighbors to the north, those who inhabited the lands of the Celts, knew me too. Brigid, they called me, and they knew my consort as the Green Man. When the moon grew and waned in the heavens, and in its course drew the blood from their bodies, the Wise Women and Healers knew me. When the cold and desolate winter gave way to the first lush hint of spring, they saw the echoes of the great cosmic dance of birth and death and rebirth.

But in their time, these civilizations were lost in the cloaking mists of history, and others took their places.

But these new cultures — the Hebrews, who followed my cloudy visage and my Consort’s fiery one through the desert and into their promised land — still knew me. Shekhinah, they called me, and my lover they named Elohim and Adonai and Lord. One of their number, the one later called “the anointed one”, begun anew. Christians, his followers were called, and at first they saw in the myth of virgin birth a spark of my own tale of creation.

But then, the Earth moved again on its axis, and their perceptions moved along with it. No longer did they recognize me as the Mother who had given birth to all. They relegated me to a wispy, impotent shadow at the fringes of their beliefs, because men were in control then, men who dared not cede any power to a woman. And in time, my names faded from their use.

And now, I am forced to stand in exile on the shores of the vast Pacific Ocean, veiled from the view of those who seek power and exploit the Earth for their own ends. They sing praises to the lifeless husks of their ancestors’ memories of me, oblivious to the vibrancy all around them that announces, to those who pay attention, that I do yet live. I watch them pillage the gifts of my Earth, rape and torture and slaughter one another, and my despair is a heavy burden.

Perchance, I still dare to hope, someone will yet discover me again, find new names for me, new legends and new songs to sing to me. Or, perhaps the tide of death and destruction will continue unabated, and a piece of me will die each day until someday nothing is left. I watch the sun rise over the hillside, and my heart aches, and I wonder if my daughters and sons will yet remember me before it is too late.

There are some questions for which even a Goddess has no answers.