Poem: Vulnerability

My entire body has been unwrapped from centuries of armor.

I find myself quite vulnerable lately ~
as if entire centuries have fallen away inside me,
as if the old worlds that clung to my bones
have finally surrendered their final breath.
So many ancient patterns extinguished,
so many invisible holds dissolving
like incense rising from a forgotten altar.

~

I stand here now in a quiet that feels primordial,
a void so vast it almost whispers with memory,
yet offers me no reflection, no echo,
no familiar contour of who I have been.
It is a stillness older than language ~
the kind of silence one meets
at the threshold of a temple
after the gods have departed.

~

And in this vastness, I feel myself accompanied
by a lineage of ancient women
who once walked into the unknown bare-souled…

~

Inanna, descending through her seven gates,
stripped of her crowns and symbols
until only truth remained.

~

Persephone, moving through shadowed corridors,
learning the shape of darkness within
so she might rise again with spring in her chest.

~

Lilith, untamed and unbowed,
choosing exile over the betrayal of her essence,
reminding me that sovereignty and solitude
are sometimes the same path.

~

Sophia, the wisdom at the heart of all creation,
the luminous intelligence that descends
when everything familiar dissolves,
guiding the soul not with certainty
but with a deeper kind of knowing.

Vladislav Dovgopyaty Photography

There is a rawness to this place,
a trembling that feels almost sacred ~
as though my entire body has been unwrapped
from centuries of armor
and exposed to the original wind
that once shaped the world.
My chest opens without my permission,
my voice softens without intention,
and my soul feels startlingly bare,
as if illuminated by a fire I cannot see
but can feel burning through me.

~

This vulnerability is not delicate ~
it is seismic.
It is the breaking-open
of something ancient and unnamed,
the kind of revelation
that does not collapse you
but reveals the truth beneath the collapse.

~

And perhaps this is the rite:
to stand here with nothing to hold onto,
nothing to reference myself against,
nothing but the echo of what has died
and the quiet, trembling honesty
of what remains.

~

A body returning to its lineage,
a breath carrying the memory of goddesses,
a soul moving through its own descent ~
unarmored, unreferenced,
and profoundly, irrevocably
vulnerable.

~ with love, Yoana

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If you enjoyed reading this, please consider checking out a few of my other poems:

Poem: The Silent Accord of Support

Poem: Ardently within the Quantum Field

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