Painting by Leo Spreksel whih he chose for this poem

Womb is an archetypal invocation. The ancients experienced womb both a a literal reality as well as in the landscape of Earth. Womb-caves were spaces of ritual invocation in traditional cultures across the world. Womb formations as cave systems, in trees, and as anthills or termite hills are honoured as sacred spaces of emergence and return.

This poem is a word-dance to honour womb-intelligence.

Womb

These are wombless times

where the expulsion of birth

from marrow and soul

hurtled out of ceremonial hips

offered with ancient howling

and tear tsunamis erasing definition

in smeared abundance of Truth,

is forgotten.

Womb-emptied is void and avoidance.

Unfleshed expression unbirths

passionless, desireless, danceless,

from absent Yonis

undecorated with blood

unwise about Earth’s pungent scent

that is remembrance of soil.

Womb is Mother of universes

who weaves blood threads into offspring

as eternal trembling of bone and nerves—

a savage unfolding that must be conquered

by sentimental ideologies of parenting.

Offspring are birthed within and without.

Their lives play out in womb’s caverns

where Apsaras dance secret revelations

even as they manifest only vestigial Truth

in asphyxiated un-bodied word-worlds

cleansed of the stench of beginnings.

We seek the universe’s beginnings in distant space

when it is simply gifted as womb

that holds the Rasa of birth’s alchemy

as wondrous, anguished, howling, blood-spattered,

engorged, necklaces

that adorn the legacy of offspring

even as they separate from source.

Devoid of womb, void of womb caverns, avoiding Body—

lab-created flesh becomes offspring

and hips that hold universe’s beginnings

forget their unshackled dance

as they sit on ergonomic chairs

in front of flickering screens

that propose Consciousness is AI

and not

the remembrance of womb’s throbbing

music of her waters

gyrations of unyoked hips

that render us as sensation in Reality’s dance.