Sheelah Na Gig, you are making your comeback.
Sheelah Na Gig, you are trending!

You’ve been called the witch in the wall, castle hag, whore
a Romanesque warning against lust
the Devil incarnate, Evil eye, Exhibitionist,
the “grossest idea of immorality and licentiousness” 
to ever be placed on a house of worship.

You’ve been reviled by Patriarchy 
as a hideous historical oddity, 
a carnival of grotesque 
opening your flaps like a circus tent.

You’ve been destroyed in your hundreds
thrown into rivers, down wells, buried in fields, 
placed on a monk’s coffin
given atroptrophic powers by kings.

Your meaning and purpose are shrouded in mystery.
With no records kept from when you appeared
sometime around the eleventh century 
you have been projected on endlessly.

You’ve been called a fertility goddess, a Celtic Queen,
the Cailleach, a Pagan survivalist, the wife of St. Patrick, 
the Green Man’s consort, a birthing stone
your mound rubbed smooth by women 
praying for their wombs to be filled 
and labours eased.

And now Sheelah Na Gig, you are making your comeback.
Sheelah Na Gig, you are trending!

You’re on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Insta.
Women are claiming, re-imagining and making you
in a multitude of media. Taking you to their hearts 
and wearing you there as necklace and pendant.

As we rewild ourselves you are an icon of our potency, 
a pulse of feral energy 
suppressed but never lost.
You give us permission to be ourselves, 
to unashamedly inhabit our bleeding, birthing, menopausing,
ageing and dying bodies.  
You mirror our Earthiness, our innate wholeness, 
the atavism of our imaginations.

You are the juice, the feist, a river in spate,
survivor, shapeshifter, shamanic prayer,
guardian of the land and the land itself.

You are Priestess of death, birth and regeneration,
gateway into the Mysterium, 
direct descendant of the stone age frog goddess, 
Of vulvas on cave walls, the most prevalent motifs of creation 
and creativity ever known.

Sheelah Na Gig, you are making your comeback.
Sheelah Na Gig, you are trending!

Femicide, Ecocide, Mass Extinction 
and Global Poverty are all intertwined.
You tell us to Resist!
To harness our powers of irreverence, 
resilience and mischief to speak up for the children, 
land and creatures 
for the indigenous grandmothers of all cultures
and everyone else who does not fit the white Imperialist mould.

You tell us to demand that history 
and Myth go back far enough
to welcome us back 
to our deepest spiritual and artistic roots
far deeper than the distorted norms
of four thousand years of fake news
to when societies were just, community mattered,
Colonialism, Hierarchy and weaponry didn’t exist.

Resist!
every Church and Mysogynistic institution
that tells women to include ourselves in the shame
that ‘Mankind’ is ‘fallen', women and men ‘as bad as each other
wars and greed inevitable, part of our collective condition.

Sheelah na gig, breasts to your knees, 
bony ribs, tiny teeth, 
a face like death, a pregnant belly, 
splaying your vulva as wide as eternity
you are a bridge to bring us back to the truth 
when we need it most.

Sheelah Na Gig, you are making your comeback.
Sheelah Na Gig, you are trending!