Alicia Elkort | Lilith | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Alicia Elkort edited and contributed to the chapbook Creekside, published under The Berkeley Poetry Review, where she also served as an editor. Her poetry was featured in the Ishaan Literary Review and has been published in many others including Elsewhere Lit, Menacing Hedge, Rogue Agent, Red Paint Hill Press, Stirring: A Literary Collection and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She was named finalist in the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Book Prize in 2015 and her poem "Dirt" was nominated for the 2016 Orisons Anthology. She drinks tea every morning and is currently producing a documentary on the global traditions of prayer … when not writing poetry by her very own palm tree.

Prayer: The Documentary

Also by Alicia Elkort: The Crone Who Appears in My Dreams, or When Will We Stop Hurting Ourselves? Before We Break You Must Not Disappear

April 2017

Alicia Elkort

Lilith

In the beginning the light like a dandelion rising on our breath. I walked the earth from clay same as him man of grit and stone aching like burnt honey, dreaming himself for his children. Who of fire of rock sings hymns not healing but everything like dust? Not grit-loved grit-flamed grit-spun but lucent, fluid, where silence, where someone's brow wants rain wants prayer, undone. I reversed every cell released the me of me allowed more than heaven and hell — not just Adam in the heat of day. I prayed forgiveness like joy, like eyes closed against the sun. I chanted the moment before creation then lanced the water's edge. When the chrysalis of my body lifted, I wrapped the space between words — the pause in the breath the sixteenth rest (in the sonata) nothing more than the sweetest exhale. He needed someone like himself. O cloud o twilight bush o fire, o morning and evening too. She loved the raw red earth, her babies, like apples. I candled a flame close like God's God. Not night, not demon but darkness inside the flame where everything is lit from within.

My love affair with re-imagining established storylines that create negative stereotypes started when I read Wide Sargasso Sea at university. The crazy lady in the attic became a thoughtful sensitive woman who had lost everything that was real to her and had no language or way of thriving in her new and distant culture. So when in a poetry class online, I heard about the myth of Lilith, that she was made at the same time as Adam from dust and that she rebelled at being mate to Adam so was cast out and became a demon who killed babies in the dead of night … yeah that wasn't working for me. It's so easy to turn characters into "other," (and one might argue that is what our dominant culture has done to create the current political climate). So I re-imagined Lilith as a spiritual seeker, not interested in the world of effects but interested in the unspoken, unseen world. I shifted her from demon to mystic. I love Jane Eyre but do I need to love her at the expense of Antoinette/Bertha? Can we love them both and grieve equally for both? Poetry takes us deeper into ourselves. My poem is an attempt to carry myself deeper into a truth that loves Adam, Eve and Lilith equally, each with a different life/soul purpose.

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