Xuxú

Poems and notes for my Xuxú. Sitting with death and an angel, and what it means to be a Woman.

Contemplations on womanhood and death

Her soul passed through me and reorganized my inner architecture.

Then she left like a faint flicker of a candle wick’s last breath inside a lantern.

I was kissed by death. Touched by an angel. Her presence changed my cells. There was a before me, and an after me. To birth a baby and hold a baby that lost her beating heart, is a different kind of painful initiation into the complexities of womanhood.

When her light went out, I felt it in my body before my mind knew. I felt death on my skin and on the face in the mirror. When she left, I tasted death with her and when she ascended home she left a piece of her light codes within my being.

That night I learned the depths of the true multidimensionality that is within a woman. Within this woman I inhabit. Can you imagine holding another soul inside your own? Can you now imagine being alive but holding a dead body of another inside your own? What sacred depths of creation, life and death are held within a woman. Keepers of complexity, mystery, deepest dark and truest light.

Oh the weight of being a woman. We carry humanity within us, we bare the war within of who stays and who goes. We bare the unimaginable pain that can seem unfathomable to a conscious intelligence. And then we can still come out of it holding softness. This responsibility gives us strength and gives us the greatest depth of compassion.

Every drop that falls from a woman’s eyes are like sacred waters of the Beloved. Divine waters. Her tears are like salt baths for the soul. Cleansing for the entirety of creation and the very system she inhabits. To see a woman as anything less than strong and precious is an insult to our Divine creator.

A meditative moment for my Xuxú

When I feel grief, I feel it through images, through art in my head that stirs and draws shapes. Currently laying on cold stone, reaching my fingers in the koi pond, making tiny circles in the water. Fish kissing the ripples, as little jasmine blossoms fall on my hands and fill the space around me. Softly, like little pieces of clouds that are caressing my skin, helping me to breathe deeper. I see her face in the sun sparkling water, light dancing on her. I smile but tears still roll down, as if they are flowing home to join the pond’s water that calls for them. In that moment I am one with all there is. The water, the fish, the sun, the woman. I think i’ll lay here longer and melt into them all.

Poems for my Xuxú

Sitting with grief is like

keeping a small fire alive in the rain

feeding it breath and patience

~

Stillbirth is like a bird

leaving its body mid-song

like winter arriving in spring

I am not who I was

before love learned that depth

she left and took my fear of death

~

the grief of losing a baby

is like sitting alone in a burnt rainforest

it should be lush and alive

but theres no green in sight

and while everything is dark for a moment

you know that if you just surrender to that barren feeling

that soon the soil will tend to itself

and regrow again when it’s ready

when the sun kisses its roots

and the Beloved is remembered

- Noor Attia