[Editors’ Note: Learn about how the “Nine Poets Speak” series came to be in place here.]
Sitting quietly on ancient rock
I feel her timeless patience enter me.
Great stone Mother—her creation stories etched into
Cracks and crevices--the green delight of life emerging, as if by magic
The mossy carpet appears.
I gaze into billowy fog as it crawls into the sacred vulva valley and with enchantment I watch the reaching fingers of soft moisture travel skyward,
Beckoning me to watch the display of dancing vultures above in the blue pearl vastness.
Black dakini birds swooping and circling in their sacred way.
Exquisite.
In my heart-voice I ask them to come near. And they do.
Dancing close above my head in quiet splendor
Blessing me with their smooth black bird goddess wisdom.
Quiet reverie. Gentle breath of wing. Ancestors close.
And then the men came. Voices loud, crashing footsteps across the field
Disrupting the gifting. Don’t they see? Don’t they feel the magnificence?
The vultures moved their dance far off into the distance
To be seen no more
Emptying the sky of their healing.
(Meet Mago Contributor) Leslene della-Madre – Return to Mago E*Magazine
Dakini Vultures by Leslene della-Madre
Leslene, this poem holds the kind of knowing that cannot be rushed or extracted—it is entered only through stillness and attention. You let the land speak first, not as metaphor, but as presence: stone as elder, moss as continuity, fog as a living threshold. The body listens before language arrives.
What moved me most is how the vultures are not cast as symbols but as relations—dakini, goddess, ancestor, witness. They come because they are invited, because reverence makes room. That intimacy feels earned, not imagined. It is quiet, reciprocal, and ancient.
And then—rupture. Not dramatic, not violent in the obvious sense, but familiar. Loud voices. Crashing steps. The intrusion that does not ask, does not sense, does not wait. The moment where relational space collapses. The healing leaves first. The sky empties. Anyone who has lived through patriarchal interruption—of land, of ritual, of women’s time—knows this turn in their body.
What your poem names, without preaching, is how easily the sacred withdraws when it is not protected. Not because it is fragile, but because it refuses to perform for domination. The loss is not abstract. It is felt. The absence lingers.
This is not nostalgia. It is record-keeping. A witnessing of how presence is made—and how quickly it can be driven away.