La Llorona The Brave
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Written in August 2o17
A woman wails with water,
while writhing down arroyos.
Her name is La Llorona.
Noah would have no water on which to float his ark,
without her story,
as old as his.
And the miracle of his mission
would be given no meaning
for he would be seen an unwise fool.
A builder of waste
instead of sacred space.
To some La Llorona is a wailing woman,
a story of woes.
To some a screaming maiden
scaring her foes.
To me the emboldened flood of waters,
usually damned by silent sisters in the night.
Freedom for those who solemnly refuse their cries,
the Feminine unleashed under cover of darkness
warning the world to stop undermining
raw life force,
Madre Tierra,
and the women who come from her.
La Llorona is a feared heroine
a siren
in the desert.
Persephone’s companion from the underworld.
Her bones know the art of cleansing.
She is a living limpia
residing in desert hearts.
She does not physically pull and push
arroyo runners to their death.
She is calling them into waters of transformation,
to find their own braveness
in El Rio Bravo.
After all,
we do not die definitively
as we are not born so.
Birth is simply alchemical,
a reincarnation of energy,
and La LLorona understands this.
The other side of our grief
and pain for life
is our love for it.
Only through eyes
washed with water
do we see this love purely.
She pushes us not to the death,
but to a death,
and that is why we fear her so.
Her’s is the song of letting go.
La Llorona
is a channel of tears unshed by millennia of women who didn’t have space for vulnerability.
She is a great relief,
like coyotes howling under star light
welcoming us back into our own wilds.
Some of us courageously move toward her,
seek her out even,
on our darkest nights,
sing, “show me the way.”
“Mother carry me
your child I will always be,
Mother carry me
down to the sea”
And there in the great ocean,
that La Llorona leads us to,
we swim below Noah’s Ark,
into waters of our own depths,
with nothing to save us,
but our inner treasure.
As we return to the surface
with the gold of our Souls
she dances
and laughs.
Hermosa Joven
she has become.
Before she mirrored our un-navigated darkness,
now she mirrors our infinite youth.
