Sophia Wisdom by Lydia Ruyle

The other night

with the Moon’s light

veiled in her dark

monthly seclusion

the wilderness Sky revealed

a dome of dazzling stars

so vast

I gasped with delight,

a familiar memory

of kinship.

Around the rim where sky touches earth,

in every direction,

lightning danced in soft spreads of light

messengers of potent possibility.

With her dark spaciousness

this Star Mother

tells me that

She will hold my troubles.

“Offer it up,” She says,

just as my birth/earth Mother used to say

when my childhood sorrows felt too much to bear.

“Offer it up!”

Dedicated to my Bella Madre, Lena Pearl, who returned to her celestial home on March 26, 2014, and to my friend Lydia Ruyle, who left this world on March 26, 2016.