Sunday, March 30, 2 – 4 pm Lynn Creighton and Mary Kay Rummel Museum of Ventura County ArtTalk 100 E. Main Street – Ventura The Sacred Feminine; The True Voice of Women Sculptor Lynn Creighton traces the history of women as sacred beings in goddess-worshiping cultures and poses the question, Where did the power of women go and where will it come from in the future? Mary Kay Rummel, Ventura County’s first Poet Laureate and instructor at California State University Channel Islands, then explores these same issues through the lens of her poetry Mary Kay Rummel This is My Body I studied the creek at the place where it plunges over falls, my face under water broken and broken again. When I was a girl I left my face, my body to find another. I looked in the church’s room of saints. My body took its cues from these women with crooked spines, closed eyes, until I curved and bent my back under a willow wand neck, the bones cracking in a leftward lean. In religion class Father Feeney spoke, white mane halo around his ruddy face, his fat fingers shaping air. “Girls, you are growing like this.” His hands forming an hourglass, his mouth a moue of distaste. “You must stay pure as the holy mother, pure as the host at Mass, pure as the Hic est corpus meum that I say over the bread at Mass.” “You have thoughts, words to confess. You must tell everything. Confession will save you,” he said. I imagined his heavy flesh under the black, and looked down my green uniform at the parts I must keep pure but his words could not reach me there. What did he know about my body? Hic est corpus meum My own words could save me. My body was a tongue with the sweet host upon it. My body was a stalk, lily of the valley growing beside a wooden house, baby brothers in my arms, blushing hearts-ease in a pot of clay beside the shabby door. My toes in grass, my fingers turning pages. My body sang to wood, to wheels, to weeds in the empty lot across the street, to the boys playing Robin Hood outside my bedroom window— my face all angles, my body a glazier’s knife whistling on glass, anticipation, rain on my lips. $5 general public FREE for Museum of Ventura County Members
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 20:33:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015