Black Mountain is bustling. Tourists are back, Christmas shopping, peering in shop windows. But I'm going beyond the lights and tinsel, just a few blocks, to my sacred ground, the Friends Meeting House. It's not long ago, three months, our little Swannanoa tore through here, along with the waters of little Flat Creek, all of it raging, raging. Dug out the earth right up to the back door, decimated the Korean church, and the group home is a pile of rubble. It had rained for three days, before the storm, water, water, picking up more and more, lifting water up from the Gulf of Mexico, swirling it into a rage of wind and rain. The birds flitter about, and I know the heron will come through here soon. The meditation rock is carried off somewhere. My sanctuary, my retreat, my place of prayer, my hallowed ground, place of music, laughter and praise. All gone, all gone.
Annelinde Metzner
Black Mountain, December 24, 2024
Many of my poems in the past three months have arisen from the disaster we've experienced here in Appalachia, Hurricane Helene. The help and spirit we've received from all over the country have been incredible, but I couldn't help but make a reality check this morning, Christmas Eve.
No power for eight days, and now I feel a joyful anticipation, -something chthonic, something about fire and light- each night as I sit at the table, two candles lit. They give just enough light so the vast darkness around us is not spoiled, not violated with endless, voracious glow. Just these two halos of light, wax carefully dripped to hold them, burning each night to maybe an inch of their height. My pen feels quieter here, the words flow as though a pipeline direct to the Universe, as though the waters of life power through my pen. I've finished two candles today, small blue stubs, wax drippings hardened, but I can't throw them away, as though those words that flowed from their warm lights through the ink of my pen leave traces still sounding in the ethers, recorded in small lights.
"Down in some lone valley, in a lonesome place....."
These Appalachian mountains drew me in, irresistibly enticed me like Calypso calling to Odysseus, magnetized me before I ever knew it. I was drawn here to this powerful feminine vortex, spinning us all inward into creativity, and a type of madness. Oh, bring it on! I knew, in my thirties, somehow these mountains were giving me that, giving me the green light, the giant "YES!" to the new, the creative, the visionary. I was nurtured in the lap of the Great Mother, Grandmother Mountain spilling out Her generous strength, as She has done through millennia. And yes, we are still here. Perhaps the wind and the rain are Grandmother's doing, noticing the dust on the table, deciding to clean it up. Perhaps this exquisite newness, the painter's palette, the untuned string, opened to me as they have to other beings for thousands and thousands of years.
"Where the wild birds do whistle and their notes do increase...." (from the old mountain ballad, "Pretty Saro")
Annelinde Metzner
October 3, 2024
Here in my beloved Appalachian Mountains, all we beings have experienced the devastation of Hurricane Helene on September 27, 2024. Many poems have poured from me since then, undoubtedly arising from the ancient soul connection the Mountains have given me.
I watch the dancer, one arm framing her face, one hip drawing upward in the belly’s rhythm. The dance of mature women, Raqs Sharqi, born of the sensuous music of the Middle East. Her hips pull us into infinity, an inward-outward shout of beauty and desire.
In Cameroon, babies learn music while strapped to Mama’s back. Coming of age, boys leap high, beaming with the village’s newfound respect.
In Bali, the gamelan orchestra cues the dancer with clangs and thumps, the bodies telling stories of monsters and gods, each movement of eyes, and fingers, and feet a perfectly timed posture of sacred geometry.
Oh humans, oh, humans, can’t you love all this? Can’t you love the way we’ve created the world, each culture born of each unique place, and each of us expressing in our own way? Doesn’t this beauty tear at your heart, that everywhere we draw up our Earth’s strength through our feet, through our hands, and we thank Her with leaps and turns, ecstatic to be stretching our bounds?
Oh people of our Earth, can’t you love all this? The exquisite mudras of Bharat Natyam, nuances of the courtship of Radha and Krishna, her love? The kibbutz youth, leaping to dumbek and flute, ‘til joy bursts like fireworks from the chest?
Oh humans, oh infinite diversity, aren’t you breathtaken, aren’t you amazed? don’t you treasure each other, for the vastness of what, together, we are?
Annelinde Metzner Black Mountain August 23, 2014
Grateful that this poem will appear in the We'Moon Datebook for
2020, and I will feature it this Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist
Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley.
(Update- this poem appears this week, December 14 to 18, 2020.)
Boys practice drumming in Cameroon
Dancers on an Israeli kibbutz
Raqs Farqi, belly dancer
Bharat Natyam dancer of India playing Krishna's flute
Flying is just learning by doing. Three ospreys (then more, then more!) announce themselves with a raucous caw, spread their wings wide, and fly out over the mile-high expanse, Thunder Hill. Right over my head they come, so I face into the sun, and then the moon, a tiny crescent. Raaaack! they cry to get my attention, and I see, with the high mountain wind, the slight shifts of tail feathers, rudders in the wind, the bend and curve as they rise higher and higher. I remember, in those dreams, you can fly higher and higher, just go! You have your wings, the wind will take you, you can bend- Flying is just learning by doing, after the first great thrust into the air.
At the foot of my Grandmother Mountain with my walking sticks I walked up through fields of silent green and gold. I found an old stone and sat gazing out to Her pointed peaks, Her Grandfather side. Bees sang to me, continuing their endless, ageless song from yellow to yellow, full of pollen. I sat in peace and gratitude. Gathering chi from this sacred place, giving the chi to my heart, I sat with the bees until meditation took me over. Opening my eyes, again and again I gave thanks.
You are not Spirit, not Ether, not Will ‘o the Wisp.
but flesh and blood, a woman like me,
and my teacher.
I see You in burgundy-red, the Blood-Root flower,
the Wake Robin, deep red trillium of the mountains,
the royally curled and woody flower of the Spicebush.
You are so real.
And when You walked on Earth,
the steps of Your beautiful feet were firm.
Priestess, daughter of Isis,
Well-trained in lore and wise,
how I crave the touch of Your oil upon my face.
MM is here!
Mary Magdalene,
here for Her own millennium,
and the voice You bring has no shame in who You are,
who we all are, Woman, strong, deep,
burgundy-red and sexual.
You walk in the power of the Sacred Night,
here to walk wherever You must,
through Love, through Transformation,
unto Union with the Divine.
With Your powerful arms
and Your dark-red hair glinting like amber,
You guide us all through these darkest of days.
Mary Magdalene, You stand
grounded
even as we hang in torment,
with Your strong and womanly Priestess arms
ready to carry us through.
Annelinde Metzner
April 17, 2012
I set this poem to music as an art song for piano and voice. You can watch a performance with Kim Hughes, soprano, here from our 2018 concert, "Feminine Faces of God," at St. James Episcopal Church in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
I'm reposting this poem in honor of Mary Magdalene on Her feast day, July 22, 2024.
Springtime on Anson Street,
full of surprises as only old Charleston can be,
I come upon a corner of St. Johannes Lutheran Church.
I blink my eyes. She is here!
Lovingly set against the whitewashed wall,
blue-robed Mary with her tender heart
glows among the roses.
Lutheran Church, church of my family,
church of no feminine image of God,
where our forebear Luther expunged
even patient, loving Mary
from our spirits, from our liturgy, from our prayers,
where in my girlhood, though at Easter we all carried flowers,
no women were imaged divine in the Protestant Church.
And here She is!
In the church’s farthest corner,
She smiles radiant against the whitewashed wall.
Someone has set two bluebirds,
blue birds of happiness at Her divine feet,
and a broad bubbling fountain nearby
reminds us of Her joyous abundance,
spilling over through all our days.
Here She is! Martin Luther, do you rejoice,
do tears of redemption spill from your eyes,
our Divine One in Her place again?
She is here! She is here!
Annelinde Metzner
Charleston, South Carolina
I save the world by loving Her.
April in Sandy Mush, the new green apple leaves,
so soft, each flutters a different way at the slightest breeze;
the butterfly, fresh out of the cocoon,
careening downhill, already a crackerjack
at navigating with her iridescent wings;
the blackberry blossoms, full of themselves,
wide open to the hungry and meticulous bees.
The air is filled with buzzing things, delirious with the sun’s warmth.
Even a cloud floating high seems to smile with delight.
It is true, I know, someone crouches somewhere in a room,
cut off from the world,
fervently praying that the next gunshot, the knock at the door
does not come his way.
I know somewhere, a mother walks miles for a jug of water
diverted from her village to sluice the mines.
I know the world will end, or so they say.
But Gaia exhorts me, “Look at me! Take notice!
For you I have perched these roses on their stems,
for you I bring the striped grasshopper to set beside you,
and the wild turkey walks, stately, through the woods.
Are you listening yet? For you, four wide-eyed deer
come to gaze at your body while you sleep.”
I cannot ignore her, I cannot turn away.
It is my job to love Her, and She is vast,
and long, and wide, and huge;
I save the world by loving Her, and in this way, She saves me.
Annelinde Metzner
Hawkscry April 13, 2012
Many thanks to William Stanhope for allowing me to write at Hawkscry.
Moon, my moon, my mysterious moon, who waxes and wanes, who taught women to mark time, your time, a mutable, non-linear time, increasing, decreasing, flowering and dying, regenerating again and again, like our blood, like our breathing. Oh Moon! Do come with your great mystery. You, who in this dark moon phase does not appear at all in the sky, yet you will cover up the Sun! Oh my moon, do, come quickly, come today, moon of women, of the sacred womb, the sacred body of women inviolate, sovereign being, true teacher of resurrection. Cover up the sun, yes! Cover up that Aries sun, shouting "me, me, me!," oblivious, that sun obsessed with dominance. Cover up the sun, if only for a minute. Show what your soft feminine power can do. Give us a new story that all will know and understand, a bright shining metaphor.
Each year more precious, the rebirth of Spring! As if now, at my age, I have my doubts, mired down in tasks and obligations, living just day-to-day, sunrise to sunset. But this! The joy of brand-new life, a quickening in the brown Earth, and in my soul. The lilac is back, each bud bursting into four-petalled sweetness. Deep in the dry leaf mold, bloodroot arises from the forest floor, its sap vermillion, exploding with life energy into unique white variegated wonder. Dandelions resume their relentless growth with a yowl! Trillium emerges, complete, ready to live a miracle of grace. And I too burst forth. Spring flowers gorgeously in my chest, silencing my fears, pulling me back, whee! into my place in the wonder of living. Annelinde Metzner April 8, 2016
It's a March day, not warm yet- The chill breeze has me in sweaters still. But in my little flower bed, life stirs! Everywhere, daffodils burst forth, nodding their heads in orange, yellow and white. Among last year's dry leaves, green pushes out, bold and confident. Lenten roses, tulip buds, peony stalks like voluptuous red asparagus. Here and there, a primrose, lemon balm, anise and mint. The perfect shapes of bleeding hearts, my Grandmother's favorite. Delightful after winter's long inward turning, each green being comes forth waving, like a long-lost friend. Is there a metaphor here? Everything we've planted can be reborn.
The egg, elliptical, luminous, whole, separate, indivisible, complete, nexus of life, invisible, unspoken, unnamable ancestral pearl of power, chosen one: you are my pride, my treasure. I nurture and guard you with all my life, a green dragon whose jewel lies hidden in the humming recesses of her dark-red cave. I share you with the mammals, and the fish too, the birds, amphibians, insects, snakes: our common inheritance, our common being. All of us, whether we fly or swim, trot, slither or leap beyond our height, we all love you the same, and commend you with lifetimes of attention and lavished care. There are others, too, ferns and firs, and maybe fruits, too, our cousins guarded within the muscled trunks of our rooted green sisters who grow in the Earth. There they pull from the black nutrition the crystals of power, the amino molecules, fuel from which you radiate light in fruit, in flower, in ovule, in shell. I feel you well, with every moon, through thirteen moons in every year. You arise and make yourself plain, crown jewel in the parade of our homeland, flowering, intoxicating, odoriferous, fecund, temple priestess of life everlasting in burgundy velvet, concealing and beckoning. It is easy, and not easy, to court you, egg, and find you whole, enthroned in all life, at once at the center and imminent in all things. It is easy, and yet to properly seek you, one must have peace, and presence, and life, abundant life, and love without question that leaps into the future, many times ones own height. I bought a dozen of you today, to boil you and color you, an essence, a symbol, a ritual item more real than words and you’re everywhere, among baskets and bunnies, colored and white, foam and fluff, and children’s hands under the bushes. It is Eostar, your long-ago day when Russian mothers baked you into bread, and Czech mothers painted you for hours, and my own ancestors walked for miles to gather you one by one from afar, all of us looking to the reborn world, the flyers, the creepers, the unfathomable sea-swimmers. These eggs are ours, our hours, our years, the perfect pearls of our lives. Annelinde Metzner March 19. 1989
My German family had many deep memories of gathering and dying eggs at
Easter. In the Slavic countries there is an ancient tradition of
Pysanka, engraving eggs with wax as protective charms for the house.
Read some fascinating history of pysanka here.
