The wolf stalks me in my dreams
She comes in my waking hours too
holding me in her wild ways as trauma
threatens to silence me, drowning me
in the insidiousness of the impossible
I feel her cold nose as she tries to wake me,
tries to rouse me from that place of frozen
fear and tears that threaten to drown me
She cries in the night, she cries in the day
howling for me to follow her across unknown
landscapes and into the forbidden depths
where trauma lives, where it waits
Her howling awakens my soul with a
hunger for her wildness, her holy way of
focusing on the present, no knowledge or
desire for what has been nor what is to come,
only what is present in the now
She does not allow her mind to replay over
and over the events that brought trauma
but rather sits beside me holding a space
for the ineffable to be felt and the insidious
to be silenced, holding a space where I feel
safe and sacred and able to choose my healing
As I close my eyes and open my mind it is not
Wolf I see, but a woman holding the radiance of a
thousand candles with flames as bright as the sun
Wolf is a woman with no signs of age and
simultaneously all ages and stages of life,
marked with the scars of one who has faced
the battering and bruising from her demons
just to name that which holds her hostage
Wolf comes as Goddess in the night
in a Shapeshifting ritual of transformation
and empowerment as the cloak of trauma
drops from the woman’s very being
Silencing the voices that held her hostage,
Wolf who became Goddess who becomes
Woman now stands in authentic being
knowing she is both holy and whole
Shapeshifting Trauma by Arlene Bailey
Previously published in Re-Membering With Goddess, Healing the Patriarchal Perpetuation of Trauma, A Girl God Anthology ©2022