Raven Hinojosa
she/her
Raven Hinojosa is a queer mixed-race Latinx writer, artist, and healer. She holds a BA in Religious Studies from Tulane University, and an MA and in-progress PhD in Clinical Psychology from Meridian University. She lives on unceded Coast Miwok land in Bolinas, California, where she is inspired by the wild coast, her brilliant community, and the Reclaiming tradition of witchcraft. Raven has published poetry, articles, essays, and a co-authored biography.
Artist Statement: This poem seeks to excavate lost practices of relationship to spirit, land, and lineage. It explores the many languages we have: cultural, somatic, unconscious, and numinously sourced. These expressions lift us out of the cultural poverty of displaced and colonizing peoples, reminding us of ways of being where cultural power does not mean power-over, and is not tied to the false paradigms of whiteness or rationalism.
Lie back into the magic of words. Words spoken, remembered, and sung.
Let sound and language be
high and low tide.
Somewhere in the interior library of the species, there are rooms filled with nothing but the incantations of the cunning. Making-songs,
oral inheritances of hearth and bedside, field and mountain temple.
Gather them.
There are words spoken only into fires and in dialogue with brook splashing over stone.
There are wordless ululations, keenings, and breath-takings that speak
when sacred texts are silent.
Melodies in moan.
Gather, too, the forgotten ditties of your mother and grandmother. Rhymes for youngsters that don’t last a hot minute, dispensed and consumed.
Gather, if you can, the tones of the bard, volva, rozprávkar whose song-stories
were gifted in cave dark stillness,
before nations, before callous by color.
Now, deeper.
Move your feet around in the well of Wyrd. Ignore the trio of faces reflected there,
the hags won’t harm you.
Grope in the sludge then, toes as pinchers, and bring up anything you find.
Fragments, echoes, and soon, whole ballads,
which, if you will serve them,
remember you to place
remember you to power before power
re-en-cant the woven world.
