Women's weekend

Just recovering from a busy 2 days at church, all the women getting together...Fun, food, poetry, prayer, dancing and discovery...
Huge thanks to Emma and Vicky for organising it all!
I wrote this specially for the start session.

At the women’s weekend
We shall leave the boys and the men
to fend for themselves; to liberate
our precious time for consecrated ends
As they refrigerate the washing
and then try to comprehend
the list of jobs we left behind.

At the women’s weekend
We shall bring our weary minds and bodies
in hope that this will be our time;
This will be the moment when we leave those lists behind
so to focus on each other in the presence of our God
who seeks to meet with each of us
not included in ‘man-kind’.

At the women’s weekend
We shall synchronise our moon-cycles
Knit bicycles from withies
Discuss the power of the matriarchal
prophet; and the proper purpose of polenta.
And we shall learn to juggle
our many hats and plates
To struggle with the daily weight
that sits upon our shoulders; to create
a new song, that our mouths may sing His praise
instead of being stuck with mantras older than the hills –
‘You forgot to put the bins out’ –
and ‘There’s nothing but repeats on television nowadays’.

And at the women’s weekend
We shall meet with One who met with women
Housewives and harlots, mothers and daughters
Those that were the centre of attention
and the ones who came alone. He caught her
who touched his cloak, she who bled and kept on bleeding
and lived outside the sphere of man’s respect;
He caught and raised her up, to stand erect
amongst the pressing crowd, and taught her
in that moment that he understood the depths of female pain,
when even sisterhood had turned its back. And leading
her on to walk along with him, so he calls each mother, daughter
Once again.