They are coming to life! They are coming!
They are singing back to us! And they are dancing!
Mama mia!
The Venus of Willendorf has hip rocked open the entrance doors of Vienna’s Natural History Museum.
She is waltzing down the Strasse,
pendulous breasts swingin’,
her hands which have rested on them for millennia
are arcing through the air like two ecstatic lovebirds.
Meanwhile in Malta’s Hypogeum,
The Sleeping Lady is waking from labyrinthine dreams,
pregnant with power for healing.
She is opening her eyes, rolling her sumptuous thighs over the platform sides,
snakes are spiralling from her ankles to the ceiling.
In every corner of the globe the prehistoric ‘Venuses,’
hand hewn Matrikas are busting out of their prisons,
archaeological sites where they have no sacred rites,
vaults and glass boxes,
in temperature controlled rooms where they are seldom seen
and there is no touching.
They are growing back their broken limbs,
repainting themselves in the colour of life
And they are DANCING.
The moon is spreading her liminal light along the pathways where hundreds of them are teeming,
cackling and mischieving.
Every woman who has a besom
has snatched in from the closet and is flying out of the back door to greet them.
And now Laussel and Dolini Vestonice have joined to make an archway.
With a shimmy and a shindig, Sheila-Na-Gig (dauntless icon of fecundity and pleasure) jostles through first, snapping her purse,
revealing and concealing her treasure.
They are all here:
Tan-tan, Bekehrat-Ram, the bone matrikas of Kotenski,
thirty five thousand year old Hohls Fehls
made from a woolly mammoth tusk,
Lespugne juggling her eggs.
Tanit baked into a loaf of bread,
Orkney’s ‘wife’ of Westray.
Grain goddesses, crowned snake goddesses,
egg shaped, fish shaped, bird-faced goddesses, birth-giving goddesses, death-bringing goddesses, hedgehog, owl and toad goddesses.
Dancing for our lives, dancing for our future,
dancing for the earth, dancing for God as Mother.