Moon that is linking our daughters'/Choices, and still more beginnings . . .

Speaking a spell of meter, magic, and mothers on International Women's Day

my daughter just after being born at home

I am moved and humbled that the Academy of American Poets sent out my poem “Moon for Our Daughters” today, in honor of Women’s Herstory Month (in the company of poems by sheroes including June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, Maya Angelou, and the amazing Marilyn Chin—truly a serious honor!).

Since then the poem has been receiving sweet comments on its form and meter. So it seems a good time for a few witchly thoughts around its inspiration and shaping.

MOON FOR OUR DAUGHTERS

Moon that is linking our daughters’
Choices, and still more beginnings,
Threaded alive with our shadows,

These are our bodies’ own voices,
Powers of each of our bodies,
Threading, unbroken, begetting

Flowers from each of our bodies.
These are our spiraling borders
Carrying on your beginnings,

Chaining through shadows to daughters,
Moving beyond our beginnings,
Moon of our daughters, and mothers.

The poem is a spell. Like all my poems and like all spells, therefore, it is designed to be read or spoken aloud. Because nowadays we are trained almost entirely in free verse, we tend to think of poems as best understood on the page. So, whenever possible, I remind those who encounter my poems, with the hashtag #speakitthrice, to read them aloud.

As a spell, the poem intends to make a change; after all, the great witch Starhawk defines magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will.” On the day that inspired the poem, I had just celebrated a ritual with my family to mark my menopause. I was thinking about a ritual to mark my daughter’s first menstrual period. And it was also a time when I was helping my mother frequently, two years before her death. At the time, I thought of the poem as a spell for menopause, menarche, and reproductive autonomy. I now see it as a spell with a wider goal—to heal the mother-wound that plagues so many of us under patriarchy.

Looking back at this poem now, I see the magic of its form as a way of bringing back the power of the mothers. Reading the poem freshly again today, I suddenly saw something about how the form does this that I had never noticed before:

The first trio of words gives a sense of something missing, a shadow preventing a full flowering of the new: daughters/beginnings/shadows.

The second trio, voices/bodies/begetting, is the only one in the poem that has no repeating connection to any other. Breaking entirely away, it even replaces the word ‘beginnings,” which appears in all the other stanzas, with “begetting.” Why ? Separation and breaking away are necessary to find ourselves, so we can reconnect with authenticity and freedom. This stanza breaks away to establish a necessary boundary.

The third trio, bodies/borders/beginning, manifests new strength after the breaking away. “Borders”brings in new boundaries have been established, “bodies” is free to return, stronger, and “beginnings” returns, free of the shadows.

The final trio, daughters/beginnings/mothers, returns, healed, to the first stanza. “Daughters” and “beginnings” are reunited, and in the same order, and “shadows” has been replaced with “mothers.” A patriarchal wound has been healed.

The meter of the poem is dactylic. This is one of my very favorite meters, the one I think of as the rhythm of the heart, healing, compassion, and unity. I call the dacytlic rhythm “Water Beat” (its rhythm embodying the meter of its name) because I associate it with the element of water, which is of course the element of gestation, the uterus, menstruation, and, I feel, of the bonds across generations of women.

If you are a regular reader of this substack, you will have noticed that many of my close analyses of poems involve the analysis of metrical varations. But in this poem, to my ear, the meter is completely regular without metrical variations worth commenting on, save the replacement of each line’s final dactyl with a trochee throughout. This is a common strategy in dactylic meter, and those trained in classical meters may think of the final two-syllable foot as a spondee rather than a trochee. Think of the closings of some of Longfellow’s hexameters in Evangeline, which clearly intend to evoke the classical option of a spondee as one way to end a dactylic hexameter. If we hear the final feet of each line of this poem as spondaic, we might think of them as evoking dactylic hexameters also—adding more epic, primal weight and power to the healing mother-work of the spell.

Goddess knows, we need more healing mother-work in today’s world! So, if you would like to invoke and evoke the full power of the spell, I urge you, once more, to #speakitthrice: say the poem aloud three times.

You could whisper it, shout it, recite it with or to others—maybe in front of an altar or a photo of someone in your motherline. You could audio or video record it, perhaps while facing West to increase heart energy, You could even say it aloud inside your mind, so you feel each syllable resonate silently within you. That works fine also—as long as you don’t cheat and start to race your inner voice ahead of your inner ear, to “think” the poem instead of taking the physical time needed for “speak”ing it.

Why?

Because the key aspect of the speaking—the part that makes it magic—is the poem’s body. A poem has a fully complete physical reality. It has symmetry, shape, physical weight, and constraint. It begins. It ends. It takes time. In short, it “matter”s—it has “matter,” which, naturally, comes from the same root as the word “mother.” And “magic.” And “meter.”

That is why this spell exists. And that is why this blog exists. It exists to bring back the healing power of meter, magic, and mother—all of them together, all of them helping each other, all of them forming the goal of the work of Poetry Witchery.

Thank you for joining me in this work.

Yours in love, magic, and poetry,

Annie