Rowan

Dark woman
named for a tree,
long-robed as an aeon,
making shoes past midnight,
cutting speech into cave walls,
glyphs into rocks for the sun to hunt,
witch-wand of woman-divining;
a rogue and a wastrel withal
skittering papers in gutters
like the careless wind she is,
but well, and well enough
in light of her singular need:
To be true as Rowan is tree.
Her other names, quintillions
in stretch around Gaia, cohere,
break apart, ribbon like Gulf stream
waters streaming through oceans,
braided by name-struck winds
that pronounce each other lovingly
despite swift passage
and unknown destiny.

Women bearing other names
ask her to divine the language
which does not see or know them.
Ask her to inflate the words
and let the seedpods burst,
send them out as messengers
into atmospheres which stifle,
shrink, and shrivel women
should they speak as human beings.
Rowan, listening to her sisters,
hears them to holy speech.
Tapping her cobbler’s hammer,
rhyming as moon-pulled oceans do,
she tells her half-made shoes
that women are changing,
speaking with their own voices,
emerging from the long dark
in light of the quickbeam tree,
the red of the rowanberry,
the power of deep divining.