Poetry from Nova Martin – America's favorite transwoman feminist lesbian druidess poet
She’s coming.
The full moon is coming.
In the forest is a vast multitude
of love and beingness.
And so I smoke my cigarette
under the trees
to give them extra carbon
because she’s coming,
the full moon is coming.
God, here she comes.
Yes, she is coming.
She is an oracle
I turn to every 20 years;
to buoy me,
to collect me,
turn me into life.
To say —
no woman will ever love me,
no earthling love for the poet.
Therefore I best believe in
and lean into life;
find the love of life within this.
Her eyes dance at me,
at my spirit’s dancing.
Again, she calls me.
She could be
the Oracle at Delphi.
She was once that.
I’m certain.
I was there with her.
Priestesses.
Priestess sisters.
She says my weight is cosmic.
No woman will ever love you.
You were made for this world.
The healer… diviner.
I hear her.
The tune is unknown.
I hear her.
The Oracle turns coldly,
a reminder;
we make of life and also of others
what we will,
what we can.
The unloving, I don’t hear them.
I have work to do.
Long journey.
Sacred. I love her for her eyes
of stars I look into
and this reforms
the renaissance,
a renaissance of women.
My always lone-woman self.
I take up the call to still
believe in.
I am the sanctuary.
She is my oracle.
She reiterates —
suicide is not one of
my medicines,
nor my spells.
I am saved, so are my lovers.
There is so much work to do.
She does big work.
The legends speak of
the ravines of lost lovers.
You tell me with
moonlight.
What others cannot say.
I’m woman, but I’m
not woman.
It doesn’t matter.
I’m sex and sexuality.
My eyes shine
bright and jeweled
in night
glancing up there,
lofty clouds sail.
You looked,
saw my brunette hair.
It’s fire,
shaded and shaped,
upon your vulva.
This formula of heaven,
my tongue splits upon you.
You looked.
You remembered.
My eyes still shine.
You don’t want to see them.
You can’t unsee them.
The good lover
you wanted.
A body forged with the
beats of your heart.
The moonlight carried
your cries to me.
I’m here
under the three trunk oak.
My forests and my wizards
lead me in my days.
The living network
and the Dead.
My days are bound before
the sunshine’s chords,
the spirit clouds,
the respirations of oaks.
The calls, the draws,
herald my fate,
their listenings and their vibrations,
become my tongue,
my way, my steps forward.
My heart is like the forest’s roots
and my breath is the endless vapor
of the unliving,
their expanse across all time,
it shapes and fills my
now-woman body,
and rings my now-woman soul.
These curves
do the work
they were meant to do
… thanks to their conception
from the woods,
the lichens,
and the moss
as my ghost loves
hummed on.
It is to be said
It needs to be said
Women can love each other
It is “ok”
It is forthright
a way of the Universe
A force and an expression
A form of magic
Very wonderful, applicable,
practical and beautiful magic
Sleeping beneath a tree
I have seen us
as women in love with each other
Grappling, entwined and carnal
The tree has seen us this way
Continues to see us
And wants to see us
Two women loving each other
In branches enveloping
In giving shade and shelter
In standing by for the
ways and days of solitude
and growth
Two women loving each other
The oak tree down the block,
diseased and old,
sent the cat,
diseased and old,
on his way.
The tree called me down the street
to take a strip of its bark
back into the house,
so the spell of diseased and old
could be broken.
And then like that,
in a matter of weeks,
the cat whom I had
lived with and loved for
seventeen years
passed away.
Then one day,
eleven days after the cat had died,
the oak tree conveyed unto me
on an afternoon walk;
that those seventeen years
I’d spent living and loving the cat
had been given back to me,
that time doesn’t always work
the way humans think it does.
When you had a tumor
I went down to the giant
wizardly oak trees
along the Trinity River
in the center of Fort Worth
and I prayed.
I told the trees there was
someone special to me
who was sick, who needed help,
whom I hoped they would heal.
This was early Spring of 2018
and the trees still had not grown
their leaves or buds.
The trees were dreaming still.
In their dream space
I saw your sister who had passed
and she stood between portals,
showing how time was
multidimensional
and we could move through
the portals.
I envisioned the rings inside the trees
and that through them
we could go back in time
and there in the past,
heal your body,
or at least take it on a different
path of cellular development.
I felt them. Asked them.
They guided me.
This was my first time
encountering the wizardry of trees.
I took two giant acorns
from their basin
and kept them as talismans.
I believe that not only did
these wizard trees
optimize your cellular configuration
but they opened a path in time
that led to our golden years of love,
living out at the country houses together,
watching sunsets,
chasing fire flies through the big field
under moonlight,
holding you like a baby in my arms
in the oak forest,
playing countless guitar songs to you
that you always meowed to,
and you watching me turn from a druid
into a druidess.
I sat with the Trident Oak
to pray.
Felt your anger. Felt your hate.
The more I felt,
I felt love
and that is how I know
to remember you.
At the base of the Trident’s brow
tears streamed down my cheeks,
sunlight warmed my soft sensual skin,
and I remembered ancient memories
where we loved each other
and there was spring time in the air,
there was belief.
I took this feeling and I felt it,
I sent it to you.
This is how the Trident Oak
teaches me to pray.
The trees can do
most anything you ask of them.
Go out into the woods,
find a grove, or find a lone tree.
Talk to them.
Speak your words out loud.
The trees communicate with each other.
There are approximately 3 trillion of them
on the planet.
They listen to everything.
You can request anything of trees,
but there is one limitation;
you cannot request anything evil.
And it’s not that you can request
something evil
but they will refuse to do it.
You can literally not even make the request.
Just by requesting something evil
you void their trust.
They will not act. They will not utter.
So ask yourself;
is this evil I plan on asking this tree?
If it is, it will be obvious to you.
This is but one way trees have
educated humans.
They have many contracts and spells
amongst the systems.
But the winter won’t kill you.
Winter is life.
You’re dead.
Your crystalline face
buried deep in the soil of my soul.
What is the soul,
but everything remembering everything?
Hark here old druids.
Hark here, let it be known.
I kissed you under a street lamp
in the Upper East Side
around midnight,
got busy with my hands
in your tight hot pink panties.
The aristocrats dreamed.
We kissed in a field in Texas.
Always passionate kisses in the throws of sex.
I was 26 years old when I ran down
the streets of New York City
in my hiking boots
at a six-minute mile pace
with her by my side,
months before
you and I would meet each other.
Who is she?
Who are you?
What is this?
It’s in the soil.
I don’t think you’re in the City anymore.
You may be in Vermont, or that could be
our ghost.
But the winter won’t kill you.
Nothing will.
Hark here old druids,
let it be known.
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