(She Summons Excerpt)  Why is the World calling for Goddess Feminism, Activism, and Spirituality? by Jennifer Cooper

[Editor’s Note: This piece is included in She Summons: Why… Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality?” Volume 1 (Mago Books, 2021).]

The week before quarantine began I felt a squirrel inside me telling me to pick up seeds, art supplies, bales of soil. A storm is coming, get what you need to grow. And my head hung low because my heart knew that victims of domestic abuse would be locked in their cages. Deep deep in their cages. A thought I could not shake although I didn’t know what to do.

A month into quarantine an active shooter broke across my province; in what is now recorded as the largest mass shooting in Canada, (blatantly disregarding what the colonists did to the Indigenous people when they stole this land). As the headlines began to roll in I knew just what brand of unhinged this man was and that he has a much longer line of victims than the souls he took from the world that day.

Every other survivor and victim knew what I knew. When the headline about what a nice guy he was came through, those survivors, victims, and I knew that narcissists are master manipulators and care deeply what others think of them. We knew how charming a monster could be. I read each headline that unrolled across the internet through the eyes of hundreds of victims. I heard what the media told them about how society sees them. And when the victim blaming burned the comments section I climbed into a shell. When I shell finally cracked open the bivalves this poem/ story/spell fell out:

A Calling

she wakes in the night

to find the fear of a thousand strangers

sewn like galaxies to the fabric above her bed,

the linen sail that she and her love use to slip past the moon

the fears glitter at her

they take what’s left of the streetlamp

after the woods and the window are through

and wave it at her like golden flags in the dark

she follows the fine and pearly webbing

from each flag to its anchor,

to the spiders in their traps

sunlight flaring inside her

she casts her own threads,

whipping them out

across an aerial view of the world

out to cities of light bundles

and to souls in between

she finds them and binds the monsters

spin spin spin

the web glows

and she growls

or she hums

plucking fears

all lit up from within

she weaves in the light

she spins and she spins

capturing monsters

and tying off binds

when the monsters have all been bound

left dangling for their makers,

she retracts her eight legs

they become her eight roots

reaching down through the earth

to the flame underground,

she sends a warm glow to the spiders

then each of the spiders she

snip snip snip snips free

severs the threads left behind

the ones with the hooks

and tied off with dark binds

she unhooks and she snips

and she prunes off disease

with silk and lamplight

she patches their flags back to sails,

she sews instructions into pillows

nightly:

the dark threads must be snapped

and the hooks be unhooked

thread by thread, snip snip snip

soon the hooks will be gone

and the threads won’t grow back,

rest, heal, and then help the others

with a sigh of relief from each spirit released

she takes up the silver thread to her sail

free of fear, she climbs back to her sweet starboat bed

Jennifer Cooper: As an ecologist, my written word is a reflection of the world through a lens trained to pick up on the fine web between fine details. I live on the shore of Sydney Harbour in Nova Scotia with my children, partner, and bunnies. Delighting in anarchy, I like to transcend pigeonholes by using art and imagination to inspire scientific education and science to paint art and poetry all the while sharing my writing, artwork, and gardening with my children. 


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