My Prayer is Organic

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, a novella about two women who died and became legends in the historic seacoast town of Marblehead, MA, available now on Amazon. She is also the author of Atlantis, political poems about the United States being another Atlantis.



This new blog post will be like coming out of the closet - most people would rather tell people they are gay than tell people they believe in the Virgin Birth and aliens. I'm not gay. I'm not a Catholic, more of a Magdalena, not a fallen woman, but a devotee of the ancient tradition that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, had a daughter, Sarah, and that Jesus's message to us, that we should live simply and well in small agrarian societies, was corrupted by the church, which also smashed the fresh water system as pagan. Hence, the Dark Ages. 

And, now, science and GMOs. Why bring religion into it? Can you really believe that changing the DNA of all plants, copyrighting each "new" seed as your own, not God's, then putting these deformed seeds out into nature, has nothing to do with God?

My Prayer is Organic

I believe in the Virgin Mary

She is fierce

Do not cross her!

She can burst the sun or twist the poles

And gentle

Love her!

My prayer is organic

I pray every day

I believe in the Virgin Birth

I see nothing around me that is less or more fantastic

Mother, Mary, La Mer, Mother to us all

She is on my windowsill above my kitchen sink

Where I pray every day

Every thought, every action is a prayer

Once, this same small statue of the Madonna stood in the arugula garden

At the foot of a telephone pole

Around which my great-grandmother and grandmother

Two generations of Italian Americans

Had carved a small vegetable garden

Out of the concrete of East Boston

I followed my great-grandmother down three stories of wooden stairs

Two flights for each story

While she carried the water in a large, heavy pan

Three or four or five trips

In her eighties

I can still see her blue velvet slippers shuffling

Ahead of my small feet

What do they know of such devotion?

Oh, yes, the farmers who go out before dawn every day

They are devoted

To their belief in Monsanto, a false god

There is only one organic.

The seed is sacred

As sacred as the Mother Corn and her son, The Corn God

Sacrificed, his blood poured into the earth

His prayer to heaven

The corn grows

I am as religious as the seed

As devoted as the grass

The aliens, who do not want us to destroy our earth

Write mad signals to us in circles in the grass

While they harvest her energy

These circles we cannot read: we are illiterate.

What do we know of earth’s energy?

Nothing

We are going the wrong way

God made the seed

The petals fall gently and mathematically aligned in the right place

And now, we are unmaking

The petals fall deformed and ugly

As all those who will eat the fruit

We are still in The Garden of Eden

Unmaking is the nuclear bomb

Unmaking is against God

The aliens watch us unmake! They cannot harvest unmaking! They are afraid for earth’s energy, for their harvest and ours.

Against the Mother

Against God

My prayer is organic

I cannot grasp the Mother’s energy!

How I wish like Her, I could bounce and burst the sun upon them!

To stop them

But you cannot pray for unmaking

I can only pray

write and cook and care

every day

My prayer is organic

small and organic

a seed

©Patricia Goodwin, 2012