Uprising

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 whorling from her ankles to the ceiling.

In every corner of the globe 
The pre-historic ‘Venuses,’ the hand-hewn figurines,
are busting out of their prisons,
archaeological sites where they hold 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,
re-painting themselves in the colour of life,
And they are DANCING.

The moon is full and fat and buttery
she is spreading her liminal light 
along the pathways where hundreds of them are streaming-
cavorting and mischieving.

Every woman who has a besom,
has snatched it from the closet 
and is flying out the back door to greet them.
And now Laussel and Dolne Vestonice  have joined to make an archway.
With a shimmy and a shindig, Cavan's Sheela-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 figurines of Kotenski, 
goddesses baked into loaves of bread, 
Lespugne juggling her eggs, 
Orkney’s wife of Westray.
Birth-giving goddesses, death-bringing goddesses,
egg shaped, fish shaped, bird-faced goddesses,
     grain goddesses, crowned-snake goddesses, 
owl, toad and hedgehog goddesses.

Dancing for our lives, dancing for our future, 
dancing for the Earth, dancing for God as Black Terra Mother.