Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul QUOTES

1 " you say
we were never
meant for this vowed life,
golden bands of only us, and death
do us part. you
say love like it's held in quotation marks,
that this union soured before
it started. "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

3 " I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and

my words are a whisper
my words are a howl

I will fall , I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She.

I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted. "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

5 " I hear talk of that slippery slope, and my heart catches for a beat. But there is the musky truth I'm standing in that I can't deny, and it tastes of so much holy. That old way, the narrow line, I see now that was a slippery, saccharine surface where my soul could gain no purchase. For the first time, my feet feel sure beneath me, and that sense is twining its way up from my ankles, racing toward my knees, my thighs, my secret places, my heart. It's in my blood now, and I can't deny it. I can't deny it.

I open my eyes, because I could see even through my clutched-closed lids that the darkness is light, that the blindness has given way to searing vision.

I can't deny it. "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

7 " absence
looks like a lake bed flooded with sky
sounds like cotton howling
tastes like tear-stained pillows
smells like churning bile and burnt hair
feels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

9 " imagine the desert
mothers, with hair tangled
tighter than their theology
and breasts that flowed milk
and mystic wisdom. they
knew how to draw the singing
sigils in the sand, how to dig
rough and bitten fingers
into desiccated dirt for water
to wet the lips of their young.

women of hips and heft, who
learned how to burn
beneath the wild and searing
sun, who made loud love
against the star-flecked threat
of night, who knew that strength
is not always a matter of muscle.

imagine your ancestresses,
the prophetesses of the arid
lands, before these starched
traditions and pews too hard
to pray from, who bled true
ritual and birthed their own fierce
souls at creation's crowning -- "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

11 " we have forgotten how to press our fingers
to the tilting planet's jugular and measure
her pulse. we have forgotten symbiosis,
that she is our mother.

we have forgotten that when we rape
our world we rape ourselves. "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

13 " I am at the gates of my own destruction.

(Or so I'm told.) "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

15 " we have forgotten that we were born
of celestial cataclysm.

we have forgotten how to dance
bare-footed on the earth to the cadence
of our souls. we have forgotten the ritual
fires and the acrid tang of holy smoke
on our tongues. "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

17 " she prays to feel as powerful
as she might if God sang silent
words into her ear and answered
all the rattling questions
now "

― Beth Morey , Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul