Write by the Cards: Day Twelve
A Consequence
If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is my daily work for my Write by the Cards: 30 Day Challenge that I’m hosting. Learn more here. Scroll down to the end to see my behind-the-scenes commentary and source material.
The choice led to an unexpected consequence: {draw a card}.
Sedna, Queen of the Deep, mother of the cold waters,
Her story begins and ends in the same cruel moment:
a girl on her father’s boat,
in waters vast and gray.
The waves lap cold against the hull,
the air sharp with salt and fate, and
somewhere below, the dark sea waits,
watching.
Her father’s face, familiar and trusted,
turns hard in the face of the storm.
Perhaps fear blinds him, or perhaps
survival’s grip is fiercer than a father’s love.
He severs her fingers as she clings to the boat,
one by one, each knuckle and bone falling,
drifting down to the ocean’s open mouth.
Each piece of her taken, each piece of her let go.
And as she sinks, the ocean takes her broken flesh,
cradles her wounds, and reshapes them into life:
seals that glide like ghosts, whales that sing her sorrow,
fish that shimmer like lost dreams beneath the surface.
From her sacrifice, the creatures of the deep are born,
her lost hands transformed into companions, kin of the salt-dark sea.
Her pain is multiplied into multitudes,
her severance a kind of savage creation.
Yet she is no broken thing.
In the cold darkness, she finds power.
Her fury stirs the ocean into storms,
her sorrow swells the waves that bite and roar.
The wise ones know she is a goddess forged in grief.
To hunt her children is to disturb the silence of her heart,
and so they offer her fresh water in the mouth of every seal,
so that she, always thirsty, may taste the sweetness of rivers.
The shamans send their spirits down to comb her tangled hair,
to soothe the wrath that binds her, woven in every strand.
Only then, in moments of calm, does she release her bounty,
the life she gave and holds in the deep sea.
Sedna, Queen of the Underworld, bearer of the ocean’s pulse,
she who was cast aside, betrayed, abandoned,
her anger charges the currents, her sorrow fills the depths,
her strength turns the waves that break and heal.
She is the ocean’s mother, the one who reigns beyond breath,
the one who holds all that was lost and all that will be born,
cradling the world in her dark embrace, her fury,
her endless thirst.
Behind-the-Scenes Commentary
I was inspired for today’s myth retelling by Nikita Gill’s beautiful work around myths, goddesses and poetry. She has this deep, knowing way of bringing the stories to life in her work and I hoped to experiment and try it out myself.
I’ll be honest — I’m not loving it. But I’ve always been more of a reader of poetry than a writer of it. But I digress.
I was delighted to get this card because there’s something inherently cathartic about a woman being betrayed by a man (and her father no less) and from that rage she creates chaos and destruction and new life. This is one of the reasons I keep returning to myths, fairytales and folklores.
Because for a moment, I can either read or write about a world in which a woman betrayed is a woman furious and hell bent on revenge.