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MOTHER, LOVER, LADY HOPE by Alise Versella

Nearly everywhere we look nowadays, Mother Earth is being used up and destroyed…

I see this ravaging of our planet as a metaphor for women in society. This makes me very sad. Sometimes we are taken for granted, used up. Destroyed. The fire within us dies out.

My poem serves as a warning of what could happen to us, and to our Mother Earth if we don’t each do something now to prevent it from continuing toward total destruction.

Mother, Lover, Lady Hope
by Alise Versella

She used to light up like tinder
Crackle like burning wood
Her embers would burst forward
Like moths from their cocoon

Now they say she shatters
A little more each day
Breaking under the weight of
Fallen trees and tidal waves

The broken wings of traveling monarchs
Are dying in the sky like her orange light
Their fragile skins dust the cracked earth
Broken like sockets of the eyes that lost their sight

She was a force to be reckoned with
Fire and the Santa Ana winds
Igniting the landscape
Igniting the dying hope within

Lady hope is dying
All her elements abused
Because destruction earns more dollars
Than the veins our blood runs through.

Alise Versella:  I am a 24 year old poet living in the pinelands of New Jersey. Poetry has always been the ether in my veins and the oxygen I breathe. It is my Five Foot Voice, my Onion Heart, I am peeling back the layers of myself like a lotus unfurling its petals in order to grow fully in the waters that can sometimes weigh us down. I’m writing poetry to find myself, I’m writing poetry to save the world. My hope it that my poetry saves someone’s world from crumbling because I believe art has the power to hold us up when we can’t find the legs to stand. You can visit me at my Facebook page here or on my website here. And my third volume of poetry, A Few Wild Stanzas, is available here. 


~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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