Heather Stewart Poetry

At a Mardi Gras parade in Slidell, I saw her. Antheia is the goddess of swamps, flower wreaths, and human love. She is untamed beauty, friendship, nature, heat, and water. She is the perfect goddess to personify the idea of feral women in today’s society, especially in this little part of the country where the witches are rumored to be.

Between Antheia, witches, feminism, and all the things we seem to be losing these days, my writing has felt mournful, pensive, and often a little angry. A part of me wants to write beautiful couplets on the wonders of the world and a part of me wants to write poems that feel like screaming into the unknown.

When it comes to all the things wrong with the world, there’s too much too often. There’s nothing that any one person can do, which is practically the mantra of those of us who don’t even know how to start doing anything. Meanwhile, genocide is happening in more than one place in the world. The American middle class is drowning in debt, disappearing under the weight of a few people’s choices as the majority just doesn’t want to be exploited by huge corporations. Women are dying for want of health care.

But the flowers are blooming today. The air smells of gardenias. A rabbit is on my driveway eating wild blackberries that have been growing there longer than this house has been here. The sun is shining. The heat wraps around me like a blanket.

It’s not much, but it’s enough to remind me that we aren’t made for little boxes. We are meant to be as wild as the blackberries, to reach for connection as often as grapes and cucumbers do, to create something for the physical or mental nourishment of others. Which brings me back to writing that screams into the ether in order to better connect us to the suffering of others as well as their joy.

The questions is always: how?

So I reach for Antheia, in the hopes that she will guide me to the kind of connection that heals all of us, even when it’s painful.