Frog Woman …

gives birth under an ancient tree … mushrooms speak of civilizations dancing out of cow dung, wearing antlers carving the sky in fire box dreams. A culture of men, weapons, and war, they fight for something freely given by the earth.

Frog Woman gives a laugh, jumps over nodding planets circling the bowed shoulders of the Priestesses feeding the hearth. First it bakes bread, then it fires pots, and last it smelts steel into these weapons that will destroy all she made.

“Few will remember how we polished black mirrors, holding this future. When grain can be stored and carried, and weapons made of steel, then war will begin for tireless millennia.”

She imagines a future where man worships a shiny cart made from metal, running over smooth stone roads. Frog Woman laughs till the sun hurts and the star sisters fall out of her mouth — the Snake Bird Goddess and Cow Goddess. The first presides over birth and death, while the latter is creatrix of all art, writings and dreams. They know the superstition of sacrifice for the fertility and health of plants and community, first animal, then man, must devolve into war. All war comes from sacrifice. All sacrifice comes from the knowledge that birth must be delivered from death.

The age of agriculture can only rule for so long. And shadow times to come will neither honor nor remember the millennia to tame and name the plants, learn their properties, and develop healthy, resistant seed. With tears of fresh spring rain, the three sisters remember wild wheat harvested on golden-boughed afternoons. In just a few weeks time, a family has food ready for a year. Joyfully, they turned away from the hunt, and made sickle and scythe to replace their spears. They fashioned obsidian into larger creations — mirrors, art and deadly knives used only for the intricate cutting of cloth and hides. As spear and arrow heads were abandoned, animals became partners in tilling the soil.

Gone are the great herds that roamed everywhere, replaced by soil emerging rich and black as winter’s night from beneath melting eons of ice. Cow Goddess points to the first mushroom nipples, poking up their heads in May celebration. It’s a laughing journey different than winter’s soma dance divine with the cannibal vultures, carrying dancers off to commune with dead ancestors. Spring dance has no serious purpose … just to dance … and mixes well with liquid inebriates made from bearded barley. The earth, their oldest living ancestor, will speak. They will listen and tell their children in song and dance, what was spoken from beneath their tireless pounding feet.

Frog Woman takes no credit giving birth to all of this, and jumps over a crescent moon.

“They will forget,” her sister Snake Bird Goddess says with a shrug. “They will not see us on the other side, ruled by weapons and war.”

“Still, we give them everything,” Frog Woman declares.

“I’ll give them dreams and word pictures to find us again, to sing their way home,” Cow Goddess sings.

“Yes you will … They may not remember our names,” Frog Woman sings, “ but they will know us … like a small seed caught between their rows of beautiful, even white teeth.

“The First Seed. The World Seed. Let it be sown,” Frog Woman sings, as the three Sister Goddesses exhaled as one.

 

[Gary Aker lives in Portland, Or, where he pursues dance and photography in addition to his usual andunusual writing duties. He has been writing and publishing all manner of work for over 35 years. He has two sequential crime novels published as e-Books on Amazon and most other platforms,Delusion and North of Likely …  He is an avid baseball fan — the game with no clock — and his great uncle is in the Hall of Fame.]