When I was twenty years old and going to school in Berkeley, California, I found the strangest book by Robert engraves entitled: The White Goddess. Graves' book length essay sets forth a poetic argument that all true poetry is meant to be an invocation of the triple Goddess, Maiden-Mother-Crone/ Goddess of Birth, Life & Death. His test for a true poem was that it sent shivers up and down your spine because it actually called forth the presence of the Goddess. I was already ripe with feeling for the sacredness of the beauty of the Goddess who lived in the beauty and mystery of all women. In experiencing Kundalini Yoga in my early twenties, I became more intimately aware that the Goddess dwells in all men and women, as I felt the Goddess Kundalini come alive in my body, awakening the subtle senses of the Soul, transforming poetic thoughts of the Goddess into felt realities in my moment to moment awareness.
Here is a poem I wrote which owes much to the vision of the poetic mythology of Robert Graves and The White Goddess:
The Hunting of Wild Artemis
Then he left her
Bewildered
Still desperate in her need
She saw him pulled away
With intrepid purpose
As if called by another lover . . .
How could there be another?
When they had touched just now
A place so sweet and terrible
That she knew had never been touched
In the whole history of the long suffering world
Not even by Eve with Adam
In the gardens of Paradise
Maud, you were born
On the first of May
As Beltane fires blazed
And the men & women
Danced together in skins
Some half naked
Bare breasted women
Leaping and turning
Fiery roses blushing
On their cheeks and shoulder
Their bellies and flanks;
Hairy chested men
Pounding their feet
Like drums upon the earth
Sweat flying in sprays
From curly locks of flowing hair
Orgasmic screams and howls
To make a wildcat start and gather
As the fires glow infernally
In an endless night of ecstasy
I am a bear of a man
Moving with a lumbering
And halting rhythm
Ugly and wild
Sly and reclusive
Bearded and hairy
The brotherly companion of Artemis
Upon her silver lit hunting
In the forest night
Though separated by form:
Her a naked Goddess
With a silver bow to slay
He who dares to hunt her:
I, a beast,
Ignorant of her angelic tongue
I am more a kinsman to her wild beauty
Than glorious Apollo
Lord of Light and sunlit day
Her brother
Forbidden by his own law
To know her pungent and intoxicating taste
Such a bear as I am
Like winged and lawless Eros
Whose lusty laughter
Echoes in the mountains with joy
To see the pain of men & women
He has made children again
Bewildered by the agonies
Of love in the labyrinth
Of forests & sacred groves
Of Rowan & Willow
Oak and Ivy and treacherous Yew
Of mountains and moonlight
And Beltane fires . . .
In frenzied ecstasy
The lovers dance
I, a bear, and you, a lover
Without her love
Come hunt with me
My beautiful beloved
Willowy hips
And Rowanberry lips
Blue eyes that sail
With sailor's ships
Upon the infinite nightfall of stars
The Beltane fires blaze eternally
Upon an endless night of ecstasy
For the companions
Of the wild Goddess