All right, this is, in parts, another metapoem.
I have a mild obsession with creation, the act of making, shaping, giving form. As a woman, female images of birth and the like are not only potent but appropriate.
The phoenix is also a potent image, of ending and rebirth - one which, for various reasons in my life of late, is significant.
Note also the reference to "I slit my wrists and bled over the paper" at the end of the poem - recurring themeimage.
The rest... I can't explain.
Blood mother
- 3 June, 1998
Blood Mother
Red and red and red
Scarlet-plumed creation
Birdlike, its breath of life taking it to flight
Sanguinary phoenix
A miracle shaped in mud and ash
Shaken free of me in my gout of rage
Baked to porcelain and pride in freedom.
It rakes the pain of separation
Across my thigh
With razored feathers, iron talons
This birth, like all others
A thing of absolute beauty
Too sharp to touch -
Only the letting go
And the binding of the wrists
To come.