Prayer to Cybele
☙ ❧

Posted in Poetry • April 17, 2025

Dear Goddess, let me be a mess.
All-mother, I stand before you in my smallness, I who am the universal daughter,
unasked for by all, always daughter and never girl.
Name me girl; name me woman, wolf, monster, maiden
Let me be small and strange and broken; let me be vast and terrible
You who delight in rage, grant me my rage.
You who delight in madness, let me be mad.
Lady of Beasts, let me be a beast!
Make me a home in my beastliness, o Goddess.
Teach me what it is to be a home.
O mighty mother, by stone and sap, by dirt and spore, by twig and thorn and bur
do I invoke thee. By tooth and skin and sweat,
by greying hair and cracking hands, by stubbled face and ugly sobs.
Goddess, I invoke thee in the name of all that breaks.
Hear me, o frenzy-loving nurturer of all, for all I have done
is nurture, all I have known how to do is nurture,
nurture until my body is sick with sweetness. Goddess, teach me to be frenzied!
O holy mother, unmother me now.
By my madness, let me be healed;
by my brokenness, let me be made whole.
O Goddess, in your name I offer up
all that has ever made me wanted. That bloodless fear
that so many have loved—I cut it off and offer it to you.
Dear Goddess, all I ask of you is this:
make only of me what I am.
Let me be your creature, and my own,
and, even if I flinch, let me be heard
when finally I pray this word: I want.