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EMERGENCE by Janavi Held

We Have all had times in our lives were we feel deep inner transformation occurring as we are going through hard times...

This poem tracks the plunge into pain and despair, the tuning to God, the expelling of inner demons, and ultimately the phoenix rising from the flames.

The video was made for the poem, mapping the journey from dark to light, from the prison of the mind, to the embrace of dear friends.



Emergence
by Janavi Held

1

I punctured the universe
for a place to grow my heart.
The blood of my endeavors
soaks into a history of crying artists.

I sit with that race
gazing at
a catastrophe of visions unmet
exploding into odd, disorienting shapes
which can't breath anymore,
can't give birth.

I have penetrated
the unseen universe
with a chant.

2

It has lips and eyes
this universe.
Its stomach and lungs are vacuums,
yet I am unseen,
seeking  a  deep ocean,
a restless bit of oxygen,
my mind strikes at lost bits of thought
floating, surfacing in the void,
sticking to molecules
inherited by a now disembodied voice
shrill with a definition to eat.

"You don't know how to echo." He said
and she ate ever so slowly
and her silent story was born.

Endless silence,
roped and tamed darkness,
in wordless voids
and blocked throats indignant with sorrow.

Lips shut on endless traps
and an inexplicable pallor takes hold
as breath cannot enter
the cave of her blue lungs.

Silence is a dark dawn,
Silence is the heart she owns and no one remembers.
Silence is the dream she cannot tell
and the memory trapped in her fists.

3

The stars chant at night
their light sinks into her belly
and by their grace
the deepest places are restored, set right.

This is not skin that moves
these are tectonic places in the deep,
there a thoroughly transcendent spirit appears
wildly in love
and without citizenship in any man-made country.

4

Her favorite apparition
has materialized
forming strange patterns
of light in the sky
above her seat.

Long histories melt
surrendering
to the center
of silence.

And all that
has come to pass
fades
as time swallows
the relevance
of past circumstance.

Deliberate poltergeist echoes
leaving slowly,
long shadows
and earth colored jewels
buried in decisions: seeing.

5

It is too luxurious for yesterday,
to depleted for today.

And then there is that long breath,
that sigh humming
full now,
awake now.

And that echo moves
softly, leaving, fading,
into a lesson,
into an historic ordeal.
episodic ruined minutes and years,
lost forever into the summery of what was.

Mourning remains
in the echoes atomic space
mourning for what disintegrated,
for what was born,
for the hours never to return,
for the grace achieved
and the courage
which has taken
the echoes place.


6

A new breath
clamors into her lungs
as flight takes liberty with the air,
the free summer has crossed
the expensive path of spring
paying for freedom.


7

Time slips from her open mouth.
Leaving a dawnless year.
Immortality its only gift.

She sees tomorrow
looming large
dripping from her hungry heart,
seeping from her longing skin,
drenching her eyes, requesting
the Eternal Future to define her present.

No longer will she sit
with mythology eating at her mind
and the archetypes, the seers looking
for the path she should take.
She is lost to those stars
and to the hands of fortunetellers.

8

Now she abandoned her past to a whisper.
And the archetype?
He is dying now.
And his rotting corpse she is removing.
one decaying organ at a time.

And now there is a maze unwinding
its pathways are like her veins
complex languages of blood and memories
untangling
as she surrenders what is not her.

9

A banished wanting
gets into her eyes
and cries her soul back to life
after the death of
a thousand tongues
and the Soul of the universe
drops a paradox
of fertilizing sound
onto her garden.

A siren comes to life
from the death
of a thousand births
and the longing
of an ancient child slips
from her jealous hands
and bleeding wounds
can't suppress
what they are thinking.

The soul did not breath
without her voice.
Her deities have
have brought her back to life
from a
long hibernation
of speech.

10

And the chant is louder now
she is unfolding
dusty wings, slowly, carefully, one at a time.
The future unfolds her out of my lungs,
out of the bleak forecasts of the fortunetellers
she rises, contrary and golden,
she is the archetype shattering the phoenix,
destroying the mythology of hell,
stretching into my arm,
hand in my hand,
outliving the past
in my lungs
she breathes.

And now the Supreme Soul speaks:
I am birth,
and the dawn and the eastern sky,
the first love, and the love that lasts forever.
I am a flower opening,
the chanting of monks
and the Devotion of the Divine

listening clearly now:

I see
I have wings spreading
towards my own eyes.

and

The sky is falling today
into my open mouth.

It is the dawn to which I listen.

Awake again.
Artwork by the author, Janavi Held


Janavi Held started writing poetry and wandering around with her father’s camera as a child.  At the age of nineteen, she began practicing Bhakti yoga. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Goddard College where she studied poetry, photography, and media studies.  She is on the verge of releasing her first book Letters to my Oldest Friend: A Book of Poetry and Photography. 










~If you are interested in seeing your poetry appear in this blog, or submitting a poem by a woman that has inspired you, please click here for submission guidelines. I greatly look forward to hearing from you!~



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