A Found Prose Poem

For Miz Quickly’s Impromptu Poetry Day 20: Prose Poem
http://imprompt.wordpress.com/

A Woman’s Way of Knowing

From:  Still, Suzan (2011-07-13). Commune Of Women (p. 352). NBN_Mobi_Kindle. Kindle Edition.

Sophia questions that herself: how can she be so sure of what she’s feeling – no, knowing – right now? After all these years, she still has to remind herself: all her life, she’s moved among mysteries and she knows when the Mysteries are moving in her! The smell of water in an arid landscape; of snow before it falls, of ozone just before lightning strikes. Her nervous system dances with these and sings with them in ancient harmonies. And always, out in the woods at the periphery of sight and sound and touch and smell, there is the flicker of something deeper, wilder, older still. Beings armored in exoskeletons of old ivory, winged like butterflies, singing like the stars, powerful, uncanny and evasive, with the black, lustrous eyes of goats, sensual, amoral, humorous, vengeful and wise. They could morph from the gnarled roots of trees, from rocks scaled in lichens, from shadows glimmering through the deep trees. Their songs drifted through the air of the woods like fishing lures sinking through the shallows. They sank their hooks deep in her flesh and reeled her in. She was theirs. They took her and changed her and taught her their ways and then threw her out again to wander home in twilight or dawn light – dazed, blissful and only nominally human.

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Notes: I have written a few prose poems, but for me, it can’t be done at a moment’s notice. It simply happens, when it will, much like what is portrayed here in the words of Susan Still. Hard to explain, but something one knows, she knows, that she knows. A few nights ago, I was reading Still’s book and came across this very descriptive portrait concerning inner knowing. It took my breath away because it was deeply profound, yet utterly familiar at the same time. I marked it because I knew intuitively that I would need it in the near future. In the book, what I have condensed into one solid piece of writing, actually appears as several paragraphs. I also added the title A Woman’s Way of Knowing. Those are the only changes I made to Susan Still’s words. Each time I read it, I am deeply touched by the words and my own intense response to them. They swiftly move past “I wish I’d written this,” to “I know this, deep in my gut, I have always known this.”

I love synchronicity.