Last night, I came across a poem I wrote back in 95… the title grabbed me with its reference to the wind (Tempest + Gale = wind).

I was in a Pluto square at the time and in a big rage at God (or whatever masquerades as God in most organized religion), pumped up, feeling like death couldn’t hurt me.

“Come and get me! Yeah I said YOU, chickeenn…’ the poem said.

Then, I got scared, put the thing away and never did anything with it. I know, I know.

Personally, I feel sure that if I die, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right here, enjoy my body as it melts into the earth, still aware but slowly expanding to become one with her.

It’s happened to me before. Every past life regression I’ve done (three, with three different hypnotherapists) has taken me back to that same experience. I’ve *never* ‘gone to the light’, whatever that means. It feels alien to me.

It’s probably because I’m fey. The Church used to claim that the fey folk have no souls, which just means they don’t separate from their bodies and go off to some other place, they stay and change form until they reconvene in another time and place.
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This may have been the first of the poems that Tempest’s death has inspired… Peter posted it on his Facebook page the very next day. With his permission, I’m reposting here:

Force of Nature

Gale force winds blow the teardrop rain brutally
Sideways, like the course of many hearts today
No teapot will contain this Tempest, it is too big and wild
And freer from fleshly constraints than she would choose
For she inhabited her Earthly clothes more fully
Than hundreds of less vital storms
And blew your house down time and again
Stiltwalking and stomping across screaming stages
Commanding our attention with an ever-opening voice
Plucked banjo strings or electric squalls
Goose down heart obvious under that windy bluster
Which the elements at hand could never obscure
Blowing open doors to rooms we would never otherwise enter
Taken out at twenty five, so achingly alive
Was planning to live forever
Today the dinosaur puppet skeletal remains of our façade
Crack and crumble to dust
As we entrain with her and float boneless
In tidepools of grief

by Peter Cloud Panjoyah

Elizabeth Gries wrote a beautiful poem that speaks my feeling so well I asked for permission to repost it here, which she graciously gave. Thank you, Elizabeth. This is stunning, wrenching, wonderful and true.

November Grace

Counting down to that dreaded November night again.
Every year, the same routine
Steeling myself to face another anniversary of her death
My mother, Grace, took her life from me when I was 12
Sudden, violent death isn’t something you get over; just learn to live with.
Ugly and raw, that word… that dirty deed, that hidden, shameful secret in the trash, Suicide…

And now, another Grace departs on the witching hour of a cold, nocturnal November
Our very own TemPeSt Grace Gale…

Naively I fell asleep, trusting the world would still be as I’d left it in the morning.
Stolen from us while we dreamt
Our TemPeSt Gale, blown over
Our TemPeSt Gale, blown away

From somewhere
I hear a voice, screaming,
Hemming me in,
The world’s spinning
Tilt-a-Whirl, reeling
Pinning my ear to the ground
And it’s my voice I meet there
My voice

In minds eye, I see you
Ever tumbling from blue and white poetry-on-wheels
Your latest tribe of minstrels in tow
Laughing and fearless,
Furiously embracing every passion.
~We thought you were invincible~
That each morning, you’d arise with the sun, greeting us with crooked smile…
But all is still and quiet now
Utter, harrowed, gutted silence.
No goodbyes, no goodbyes…

That night…
A spark
Struck from our collective hearts
Sent ablaze ‘cross gloaming sky
As useless hands reach out
And fruitless mouths, beckon
To kindle your name, on whispered breath
Eyes tracking, full of rain…
Desperate eyes, blind with rain
Straining to hold you,
Just one… moment… longer…
Until abruptly,
The Veil parts,
Ushering in a strange, unearthly calm
And our TemPest Nightbird
Disappears amongst the stars…

- Elizabeth Gries

for Tempest Grace Gale

I am pixelated,
lacy fronds of frost encasing
the heart of my matter
etched in stone patterns of grief
for she whose existence
we all depended on
now ruthlessly bereft
of future

she, robbed of life;
we, denied the gifts
she had still to bestow

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Tempest Grace Gale
Feb 5, 1984 – Nov 17, 2009
murdered in paradise

Hear her music on myspace

Once again, I find myself thinking of, feeling for, wishing for my children. I speak to this feeling on this dark night as we move toward Scorpio New Moon. There is a time and a place for such a subject, and here we are, now.

It’s not their fault that they are who they are (ie, my children). They didn’t ask to be born, nor did they ask for the storm I called into being partway through their childhoods.

It’s true, I confess, at my behest a tempest tore through the fabric of my family, sundered children from ancestors. To become a better mother, I chose to face my demons.

I knew not what I did; I was not ready; they were not ready.

They raged like escaping a cage, or Pandora’s box. And lock, stock and shock, I was overwhelmed, underwater, lost in an inundation of pain, an avalanche of tears, a phantasmagoria of multidimensional experiences. I saw my schizophrenic brother in the hospital, and I knew that could be me.

I was careful, I channeled my crazy into songs, stories, poems, drawings, tears, personal growth study and creative conversation.

Still, it had to have been hard to be my kids. I feel for them. Not that it was so easy to be me, but it was their needs I most longed to meet, and I grieved as I washed away on waves of creation.

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